This afternoon i had a tea party with my brothers Hayden and Amon. We let mum and dad come as well (but they are not very good at tea-partying, although mum tries). Me and my brothers often have tea party’s. We have been having them for years. I suppose i don’t really appreciate how unique this is.

At the tea party i made some savory sandwiches, Hayden made some cup-cakes called poodle poo’s (named after the suspicious chocolate squirts he decorated them with). Amon made the tea and the purple lemonade.

At a tea party is is ESSENTIAL to wear a funny hat. (i have over twenty funny hats in my room alone so this is not a problem). Sometimes we’ll go all out and dress up completely strangely. We take on weird names like Sir Wrinkle bottom, Alfred, Rudabacker etc. And we speak in English accents and discuss beautiful ridiculous things. Things that are absolutly absurd. Things that should be written down and published or preserved. We are all channeling the Mad Hatter from Alice in wonderland and we incorporate Wonderlandian logic into everything we say. Poodles only have half bodies, sand is a political issue and eagles are bad losers at poker.

I suppose this is the overflow from our hyper imaginative childhoods. We would always play imaginary games starting in the climbing tree and ending anywhere our imaginations took us. I remember, we had different genre’s of games we would play:

• Creatures of the forest floor: you could decide to be a mouse, frog, hedgehog, squirrel etc.
• Magic: elves, fairys, goblins, dwarves, centaurs.
• Mutants: you picked your super power, we usually met our evil genius creator.
• Haloween: you could be a ghost, witch, wherewolf.
• Jarassic: you could be a dinosaur, but mostly we were people in the dinosaur world there would always be stampedes out the back, a lot of Lion King moments (you know, when moofasa is falling to his death? nooooo!)
• Spys: we were spy’s, on a mission to retrieve some jewel or maybe spy on mum (aka: secret mafia woman).

There were probubbly many more types of games we played that i cant remember. Its sad. I vaugly remember the last time i tryed to play one of those games. I couldnt. I couldn’t keep my attention, i couldnt see it in my mind. I got bored easily and the game finished before it even started. That was years ago.

I remember visiting prep when Talia was doing her prac there. The children run out to play, and i can almost see the imaginary kingdoms growing out of thin air. A troop of boys with sticks as guns, running around the yard. A group of girls making a cubby. I asked one what she was going and she cried “we’re lady bugs!”. I remember when i could be a lady bug. It was so so simple. I could be a lady bug in the blink of an eye.

People might say i have more imagination than most. I certainly believe its my fines quality above all others. But i will never be able to squeeze back into that beautiful world of a child. I believe children are the highest form of human life. When you are about two you are as perfect as you are ever going to be. Then you start to learn to be quiet and listen, to not play with your food, and soon you forget how to dance instead of walking, how to play imaginary games, how to look at every day like its brand new, how to become a lady bug.

So I’ll hold onto my tea party’s. Its not much, but its a beautiful broken piece of a land where anything was possible. Buried deep under the layers of time. Singing like a funeral in the summer time.