What fascinated you as a child?

'As a child....' covers such a long period of time from when you are quite small to when you are building the interests which may become life long........ 'Fascinated'... well, I can remember being maybe four years old and watching swirling snowflakes coming down out of the sky and wondering how they came to be and how many of them there were and I remember tracing the magic of frost patterns on the inside of our windows in the winter.. I remember being intrigued by the patterns of light and shadow on my bedroom wall when I was sick in bed with the measles.......

In a pre television era I think we had to use our imaginations a lot more than children do nowadays, not swamped with visual images. Books were always the key to another world for me and I remember a book, which had belonged to my mother as a little girl, which was about children around the world. It was old fashioned by that time already but I loved it as it took me to parts of the world I could only imagine. We still have that book, have a look at it sometime.

The radio also took us into a world of imagination and I can remember sitting entranced with stories for children and later at school with programs about prehistory and dinosaurs. When I was old enough to have library card books became an obsession. I loved travel books and remember reading about Marco Polo and Ghengis Khan. Stamp collecting as a hobby took me to other place around the world and I swear that my knowledge of world geography was based in that hobby...

I still have my old stamp album too! Making collections was always a way of learning too, I loved collecting and pressing flowers and learning all their names. Travel, reading, plants... guess it's all still there.....