neighbourhood: in the street

When I was young there were a few pedal cycles in our village. We all knew that the rider had to pedal, with the legs going up and down in turn, to get the bicycle to move. On a rare occasion, the sanitary inspector came on his motorcycle. I was convinced, though, that the wheels of the motorcycle did not turn: they just glided on the road. Did anybody see the rider pedaling? No, all that the man did was to sit comfortably with bent knees without moving his legs at all.

As a small child, it seemed perfectly normal to me that all the houses in the road went away, to leave just blackness behind them, when I fell asleep. It was, therefore, also quite normal that they reappeared when I woke up the next morning. It really came as quite a shock later on to discover that this did not actually happen.

I used to believe…

that the bears which live in the cracks between paving stones are Russian

I used to believe that war memorials were 'warmer morials', and they were meeting places outside where you stood around to keep warm with your friends on a particularly cold Winter's day

I used to believe that when a family moved to another house, that the family living in the purchased house would move into the first family's house, i.e. a house swap. I wondered at the cooperation of it all.

There was this homeless man who I would always see on certain streets with my dad and my sister when I was little (I still see him!), and my dad told me that he was the sandman, the guy who puts the crusty stuff in the corners of your eyes at night, so I would always imagine him coming into our house at night, and laughing as he sprinkled sand into my eyes.

When my son was younger, he thought that every house with B & B sign meant that the people who lived there were BAD and BADDER. So everytime we drove past a house with this sign he ducked down in his car seat so no one would see him.

When I was little, my grandfather told me that all the left shoes travelled in a different lorry to the right shoes, so that if there was an accident people couldn't steal pairs of shoes. This was enforced by the fact that we always seemed to see Hush Puppy lorries travelling in twos.

My Mom convinced me that those black things that stretch across a road to monitor how many ppl drive on the road...where actually people's garden hoses that they stretched across the road to flatten them out cuz they didn't want to wrap their garden hoses up in circles anymore. And the reason they were black (instead of green) was because the tires and road were so dirty.

When my mom would take me with her to run errands we'd always pass this house that had stuffed animals set up for sale on the lawn, and to keep me from begging she told me they were all just outside to dry. It seemed perfectly logical to me, although I always wondered why she couldn't just be more careful trying to keep them clean.

when I was a kid and saw a van drive past that were a firm of shop fitters - I always read it as shop lifters & wondered why the Police didn't go after them

(It still catches me out sometimes)

I used to think that the eye symbol on the Neighborhood Crime Watch signs was a toilet lever, and that it meant some kind of motto like 'Help Flush Out Crime'

In one of the neighborhoods that I lived in growing up there was this old house that had its windows boarded up and the grass outside was like three feet high and all the kids were positive that a mean old lady lived in there. We called her the cat lady because whenever a kitten went missing it was said that she lured them to her house and fed them poison... forget the fact that we all bought those kittens at the town fireworks for a-penny-a-paw and thought they were old enough to run around the neighborhood by themselves. And it meant nothing that the house was condemned by the town. There was an old lady cat-napping our kitten!!

In singapore we have these drain gratings on the pathways next to roads. On rainy days, my mom used to tell me "Watch out for the gratings, they're slippery". Only i thought that she was calling them "Grey Things" because well, they were grey and i thought she didn't know wat they were actually called..

I used to think that the UPS truck was the thing that they haul people to the lunatic asylum in, with white jackets on.

When I was around 5 or 6, i thought UPS trucks were driven by Oompa-Loompas that tried to kidnap children to make them test candy at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.