The Duvet Spaceship

I guess this is continuing a theme of childhood memories – I've been writing a lot of such material lately, trying to get a grip on parts of my past, to try and find in the child the Tourettic perhaps Aspergic fellow I am today. Although I seem to have spent a lot of time scrawling about the killer hornets of the Greek islands, or the pretentious kids I was forced to share holidays with, rather than find any significant psychological insights.

I sometimes wonder if every child has had a spaceship, or a submarine, or a car, or a nest, or an anything, constructed out of their duvet. Nowadays I think of my duvet as a tent, a tiny one man shelter I'm staying in on a bad weather day in the Lake District. But as a child, it doubled as a spaceship, and a home in a cave.

Getting the duvet into the right configuration was always tricky; I remember always being very OCD on getting the duvet in the correct folding pattern to enable it to feel like a tiny space capsule, rather than the inside of an obese silkworm. But once it was set up, you could retreat within, and leave a tiny opening to act as a porthole. I used to imagine I was being put in suspended animation and being sent on a space journey designed to last a thousand years.

Although it usually only lasted until Saturday Superstore came on, and you wouldn't want to miss that, in case someone called Matt Bianco a wanker again. Eventually I was rewarded (years later) when someone asked “Five Star, why are you SO FUCKING CRAP?” If you were in space for a thousand years, adrift like Major Tom, you might miss something like that.

Eventually I grew out of space, and pretended to be a sort of Stig of the Dump figure, living in a cave up a cliff surrounded by puffins.

Playing make believe has never left me, and I'm glad it hasn't, no matter how strange it might seem to others. 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13.02.14