Mine, well one of them, is when I was around 3. I woke up in my bedroom, and a bonfire that my mum uncle and aunt were having outside was casting a reflection on my bedroom wall. I can remember vividly being petrified, because the reflections looked like huge monsters.
What is your earliest memory?
lying in bed
for several hours absolutely terrified while a giant hornet flew around the room :(
I take it you are still scared of them
I saw a giant hornet this summer. I couldnt fucking believe how big it was.
yep.
bees / wasps / hornets all but the shits into me big time :(
i sat on a bee once
i had gotten stuck in my room and become drowsy and gone to sleep on my bed. When i went to bed i sat on it and got a sting on my bum, i was young but still saw the funny side.
My father
climbing up the drain pipe to our fourth floor flat, and attempting to smash the bathroom window in with an ashtray to get inside. Nice!
Good job you didn have double glazing
in those days, eh!
It was a pretty thick window!
I don't think he got through. I think I was about 3 at the time too.
I hope you were not hanging onto his back
?
When I was about 4
Sitting in bed with my mum in Germany eating chips from the chip van and singing along to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' because it was on the tv.
I think my earliest memories
are slightly tainted by the fact that I've seen photos of me when I was younger, and now I think I remember those moments. The one I can remember most clearly is when my Mum came into my room to tell me my Dad was leaving home forever :(
:`(
Sad. Are you still in contact?
My mum and dad split up when I was 3. I am still in contact with him, he lives in New Zealand.
Hitting my dad in the knee
with a saltdish
Yeah we still talk
He's my gig buddy :)
I got into a lot of bands through my dads influence.
Mostly 60's stuff like Velvet Underground, Doors, Zappa and some obscure stuff as well, like Iron Butterfly.
When I was 16 I went over to meet him, and I played The Wedding Present - Bizarro to him. I proclaimed that the Bass player was the best in the world, and he nearly choked on his tea. Cant blame him.
Likewise
Although he got me into The Birthday Party, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle (which was stuff I had listened to when I was really little), so it's interesting how I got into them later on in life, and those bands sounding quite familiar.
not sure about 'the' earliest
I remember losing Teddy Thomas in Tel Aviv and crying lots, my parents taking me back to this fair ground we visited earlier to look for him. We didn't find him.
I can also remember
being lost in a supermarket, and hearing my mum calling me but I couldnt see her. Blind panic!!
That must have been pretty early.
I remember
my earliest memory of embarrassment. Holding the hand of a lady in the queue of a supermarket and calling her mummy.
Heartbreaking.
I think I remember going to my grandparents house just after my grandad had died. My little sister ran upstairs to his room to see him.
Failing that, it's probably me sticking a pin into a hosepipe at my grandma's house and then lying about it. I was a mischievous child at times.
Looking at the steretlights filtered through rain on the car window
as we drove to hospital when my brother fell mouth-first into the sideboard.
..
morbidly, a month before my third birthday - sitting on the sofa at my aunt's house with her gently explaining that my mother was dead.
what larks eh?!
Sorry to hear that.
This threads turning into a bit of a tear jerker.
Playing with a blue toy Ford Escort
on the floor of a house I lived in when I was three or four.
Probably the most vivid memory from my early years was when my sister was born- my grandad came and collected me at lunchtime from school, and we went to the hospital, which smelled like hospitals. I had those danish all-butter cookies with the sugar on top, and played with my ford escort.
playing with my uncle
Not Russian roulette I hope?
Being dunked underwater at 3
I almost crawled into the neigbour's pool so my parents took me to this horrible windowless pool where they would dunk toddlers under water repeatedly, among other things, to teach them how to float.
Because I'd come out bawling every time, my mum would have to have an Animal Bar - a now discontinued chocolate bar which had animal shapes moulded into the chocolate - ready each time to placate me. Being 3 years old, these represented both the best and worst things happening in my life at that time.
I used to live on Animal bars.
do you remember the Animal chocolate digestives as well?
Did they have Animal Bars her too?
This was in New Zealand, where they stopped making them ages ago. Can you still get them here? Jesus, between this and watching The Karate Kid this week is turning into a nostalgia fest
*here
too
Yeah. Cadburys made them.
And I think they made the digestive ones that came in a box. I always remember those. Also skydiver crisps.
Are you from NZ then? I was born there.
I was born here
but grew up in NZ. So the opposite situation to yours
Thats interesting.
Whereabouts did you grow up. I was born in a small village about an hour north of Wellington. The village was called Otaki.
Otaki? Classic
I grew up in a dodgy wee place called Wanganui, which is only about an hour or so from there.
Yeah, I think I went there when I was
on my NZ discovery mission years ago. We had relatives there or something.
Otaki had a nice beach.
My main memory of Otaki was going there
for a summer holiday with family when we were kids, and then having to turn back after the first day because a hurricane was coming through. Good times
When did you come over to the UK then?
I've kind of been backwards and forwards in recent years
I've been here a year and a half this time around. I'm probably here for good now
Animal Bars
aren't discontinued! You can get them in Morrisons where I live. They're still ace.
My first memory is playing with a yellow toy van at the bottom of the stairs... my mum put it in a charity bag a few years ago, I still haven't forgiven her. I loved that van.
falling out of my bedroom window
whilst waving to my dad who was fixing the roof on the garage. :S
That's such a you thing to do
:D
:D yep!
My mum had to rescue me from the plastic roofing I had fallen on, whilst our next-door neighbour stood underneath it ready to catch me if I fell through!
How old were you?
erm... I think I was about 4 or 5.
stumbling / walking as a one year old.
seriously.
Watching the telly at about age 3
and being absolutely shit scared of an advert where a guy put somekinf of binoculars to his face and his eyes went all big.
Either that or playing on a red tractor at playschool before they gave us cartons of milk :)
meths
making sandcastles on a beach in the south of france
making the sand into 'breadcrumbs' and making cakes. singing in the sea. pooing in a park.
The last ones default.
probably
sitting in my bedroom in a blue catsuit playing with them stupid peg/hole things when i was about two, while my mum played Tracy Chapman. i also remember that i loved putting things in sockets, most often keys but sometimes food or even my tongue. i used to get in a LOT of trouble for that.
Trapping
my sisters thumbnail in the door.
It went black and blue =D
meths
a fever hallucination?
the wall paper was like changing, it was either like a desert, and too empty, too smooth, or it was too jungly and too full, too much stuff.
sorry thats just how i remember it.
I remember being really ill
over christmas once, an I reckon I was having mild delusions because I kept thinking it was Christmas day. I kept going downstairs and asking my mums friend if it was Christmas day. Horrible!
i think
the earliest is eating some flintstones themed sweets on the stairs and my little brother tried to steal some and it got violent... i was about 4 i think
My cot having white bars and my brother's having brown bars
I wasn't 1 apparently!
My first semi-memory
is of lying in my cot getting upset because I saw bats flying past the bulls-eye glass pane in my bedroom door. I know this is what I saw but don't think I would have recognised that they were bats at the age of two.
First proper, untainted memory is choosing my puppy from the breeder in Bristol midway as we moved house from Forest Gate to Somerset. I was four.
Somerset>Forest Gate?
I'd guess it was.
My mum is from Somerset.
Scalding
my hand on a teapot then lifting it up one handed from the worktop (I picked it up with two hands) and pouring the contents on my already scalded hand.
That's a good one right?
I kind of hoped it would involve a wolf but it doesn't at all.
having my hair washed
in glacier water, which was so cold it made me cry :( but my mum used strawberry shampoo, and a butterfly landed on my head.
sitting in the bath with a wet flannel on my head,
with two of my sisters and three of my cousins kids, probably all under 5, i think i was 3, with two aunts, my granny, grandpa, my mum, and older cousins all squished in the room and peeking round the door taking photos of us.
Awww :`)
.
sitting at the top of the stairs at my parents house playing with my cousins MASK figures. awesome.
Burning my legs
on a slide in Hong Kong. My dad worked there when i was little, so my earliest memories are of Hong Kong. I also remember going on a massive walk over a hill, and then going to a floating restaurant. I can still picture the squids in the tank. Very exciting to a three year old.
My earliest memory of the UK, is plaing Lego with my cousin, and getting really panicked when a bee flew into the room.
A massive walk over a hill.
That is my earliest memory of this morning. I was walking down Pentonville road.
holiday
we were in the lake district or somewhere, and there was a farmer driving his cows over the road in front of the car, and i was in a booster seat on the left-hand side and a cow squished its nose up against the window and looked at me with a massive eye, then drew back and left snot all over the window
mum said i was about 2 and a half
Getting my cat
when I was about 2 or 3. I remember this little white kitten falling asleep on my mum's cardigan on the back shelf of the car.
I don't know how old I was but it was still pretty young, younger than 4...my earliest angry memory, when my dad wouldn't take me out with him. So I went and pulled up all the garlic he'd just planted in the garden. I remember sitting there covered in soil, surrounded by destroyed plants, crying about it.
earliest memory
i was 3, and i was watching a goalie kick a ball upfield in world cup 94. kind of cool my first memory is football related.
I think it was when
waking up in my parents car alone, I was 2-3 years old, I went totally mental in the car..my parents had gone shopping or something..
I have some early memories,
but they're probably related to photos/home videos.
There is one home video at the beach, where I'm 2 or 3 and starting to dig my older brothers sand hole. He gets angry and raises his spade above his head ready to strike and my dad, who's filming cries "Bill! No!"
It's pretty funny because I'm blissfully unaware.
Getting bitten on the shoulder
by a boy in nursery
fun stuff
Love at first bite?
Sorry.
Being
told off by the guy that was laying new grass in the rubbish, muck, mud and sand that was the garden in our new build house. I was 3 or 4. I was kicking the edges of the new slabs of grass. What a little bastard.
I think most of my memories come from
photos and home videos and stories. I think the first I genuinely remember was my mum being called in when I was in reception class and wouldn't colour in shapes.