...I managed to mentally label the little green flue on top of next door's corrugated shed with the word "earthquake", when I was about two. For that reason, the phrase "earthquakes are green" entered into Bear family folklore.

when small, was promised a trip to 'Little Woods' by her mum. She was so excited as she climbed on to the bus and went all the way to town. She conjured up magical images of tiny trees inhabited by scampering mini-squirrels and cute, compact, twittering sparrows.

Imagine her disappointment on arriving at Littlewoods.

When very young and still at Primary School I came across a copy of a geography text book belonging my much older brother.

In it were line drawings of the countries of Europe and Scandinavia. Alongside a few were pencil drawn facsimiles, made by my brother. He had obviously traced these, for reasons best known to himself possibly long forgotten - even at the time.

To my tiny mind though, I managed to convince myself that to gain access to Middle School education you had to prove yourself a fantastic cartographic draftsman. I was convinced that before I left primary school I was to be sat down in a room with a desk, a chair, a pencil and a piece of paper to be sternly told to draw a scale perfect outline of Finland, or somewhere.

I think I even may have practised.

I burst in on my mum in the bathroom. I don't remember her reply to my asking "Why are you putting a mouse inside you?", but it must have been worth hearing.

When I used to hear about the leader wearing the yellow jersey I wondered how they changed it between them during the race if they were overtaken...

that if I shut my eyes no one could see me.

I thought that colour had only existed since the end of the sixties. I distinctly remember asking my Dad what it was like to grow up when everything was black and white.

Ikea was a country

"A man is helping police with their inquiries", I used to think how nice it was of that man to give up his free time to help them out.

I also used to think that were you to cut into human flesh it would look like baked ham.

And I used to imagine that if you smashed open a plaster cast on a limb, yolk would come out. Consequently I've not eaten a boiled egg for about 40 years.

If I saw a sign that said 'City Centre' I imagined there'd be hundreds of people flying kites and laughing there.

I thought that Braintree was named after the shape of the special kind of trees that grew only there.

When my parents said they were going to blow it up when they got it home from the supermarket I cried.

There was a child in my class who 'didn't have a daddy' (oh the shame back then). He also had some congenital stomach defect so had frequent absences from school.

Knowing that it took two to make a baby, I decided that he had bits missing because his mother had produced him unaided.

Based upon people in silent films/pre-talkie film footage, everyone walked really, really fast in “olden times”.

Aforementioned “olden times” were actually took place in black and white.

And slightly later, Great White sharks were as enormous as the one was on the Jaws II promo poster:

A huge disappointment when I was taken to see the film (aged 6, believe it or not).

Of course, there was lots of talk in the playground about how piranha fish could strip a person of flesh in seconds.

However, I believed that one piranha fish could accomplish this. The size differential between small fish and man never entered my head.

When I was seven, I thought guerillas were real gorillas! And I didn't even watch Planet of the Apes!

For a long time when I looked at the logo of Pan Books I saw a head of a kind of bizarre cow-like creature - it was many years later (I think near adulthood) when I first saw the boy with the pipe.

Probably says something very disturbing about my mind....

that the hall of my Infant School rested directly at the centre of 'God's Almighty Hand.' There were lines on the floor, which made this idea all the more convincing.

Also from Infant School - a very well-off family in my village had their own swimming pool. This was referred to by our headmistress as a 'bath.' When the posh kids reported in assembly that they could now swim one length of their bath unaided, I remained unimpressed, as I could simply do this by lying down in my own bath.

..as a small boy by being told I'd get a ride on the chair. Images of pullies and hoists were dashed when the dentist raised the height up by a few inches by some foot pump mechanism.

exactly

When I was about six, my pet cat Sooty ran away from home.

I know this because my Dad told me so. He even took me down to the bottom of the garden and showed me where Sooty "must have jumped up on top of the compost heap, leapt over the back fence, and....got ...er....lost".

When I was about 13, we were having Sunday dinner, and talking about someone's pet having died, when Mum piped up: "Oh Michael, do you remember when you ran Sooty over on the drive? It was awful, wasn't it!"

My jaw dropped. My knife and fork clattered onto the plate, as I let go of them in utter shock. "What do you MEAN, when Dad ran Sooty over?"

The dozy cat had been curled up on the drive, and apparently not moved an inch when Dad had opened the garage door to stick his car away for the night. The parents had decided not to burden me or my brothers with the real story of Sooty's demise.

I didn't speak to my Dad for a week, the feline-squashing bastard.

in a new town and we had a thing called a 'twin town' (in West Germany) - no-one else had one in those days, only us. I used to wonder how they had managed to find another place where the hills and rivers were arranged just the same, so that they could build it ...

Dont step on the lines between paving stones or a bear will get you!! So, thanks to my parents, i spent my early years walking like someone who,d shit their pants.

a small bird was let down by it's lack of knowledge regarding the physics of glass and flew into our porch, straight into the window at the back, immediately rendering itself lifeless. It was placed into a memorial shoebox and left under the Christmas tree at the location my sister and I had left vacant for the annual toy/unwanted satsuma replenishment. Come Christmas morning the shoebox was gone and, lo and behold, a collection of transformers, Barbies and the aforementioned satsuma had indeed materialised.

This lead to the false belief that Father Christmas was not only a jolly, generous, slightly obese bloke who reliably delivered toys and fresh produce each yuletide, but also a collector of deceased creatures. I always shuddered at the thought that one day we would have to leave Grandma under the tree. Luckily, she survived longer than my misplaced ideas of S. Claus Funeral Directors.

that moustaches grew all the way out of men's nostrils, and that instead of being made of facial hair, they were actually made of very long nasal hair.

I drew up (or may have been told)a whole scenario of how the song came to be combining my extensive knowledge of God and royalty.

One day Queen Elizabeth II was combing her hair. It was so long she needed to dangle it out of one of the upper windows of the castle she lived in.
She leaned out too far and took a tumble and as she plumetted God reached down from the heavens with a mighty hand and caught her and placed her delicately back in her window where she resumed her haircombing activity.

That image went through my head every time I heard the song, it seems Pythonesque now.

What the orange flashing indicator lights on cars were for. "To show which way you're going" she said. Which was genius, I thought. I mean, how did they know which way I was going?

I also thought that road names would have to be unique, to avoid the obvious complications that any duplication would create. Which led me to believe that someone would have to be living in Arse Avenue or Shit Street.

but I have read that original post a few times now, and I'm confused...

What do you you mean a stitch is a retractor? Isn't a stitch just a stitch, even in the medical sense? Genuine question!

just after the war, there was still plenty of anti German feeling around in the 50s.

My mum was also forever warning of the dangers of not washing hands before meals "because of the germs".

My 5 year-old brain somehow put the two things together and decided that the word "germs" was derived from those nasty Germans.

We flew to France on a very cloudy day. Above the clouds, I saw the sun. I thought the sun was actually right there, just above the clouds.

Always thought they said "Toilet" - Bristol seemed awfully convenient in the 70s

I was convinced (until I was about ten, I reckon) that poison worked by tasting so disgusting that you simply died of fright on the spot.

I was around 6 or 7 when 50s rock and roll began in earnest and for quite a while believed that Fats Domino was somehow inexorably linked with the pub game that shares his name.

(cue I Hear You Knocking joke).

Even better, a couple of years later someone convinced me that Little Richard and Cliff Richard were related. I only believed that one for a week or two, though (probably until I saw a photograph evidence indicating that this may not be the case).

... and grown ups talked about "colored people," I envisioned someone with a red, blue, green, orange and yellow stripey face. My granny once said "you've got a colored boy at your school, don't you?" and I said "no Gran, he's not colored, he's brown."

As a child growing up in the 70s I believed top level professional footballers played for two clubs at the same time. This came about as I had seen a famous player playing for one team on Match of the Day and then, not knowing about the transfer system, seeing him play for another team a week or so later. To compound this error I then began asking friends at school that if they were a footballer which two teams they would play for? God, it's no wonder I got the crap kicked out of me at school on a regular basis!

I thought that television was small pictures sent through the air and magnified on our TV.

When I heard on the news that someone had committed suicide, I heard it as 'sillycide'. So I assumed that the person had been massively silly or crazy and had died as a consequence.

God as a magician in the clouds, working up potions in a big cauldron to answer prayers.

As a youngster I heard a politician daring a rival MP to:'Repeat that outside'. Knowing nothing of libel back then, I assumed he was offering him out for a scrap. 'Good on yer,' I thought and resumed reading Spider-Man

Sadly, even then, I had a feeling my old man was wrong

I used to worry that the other drivers wouldn't be able to see into the car when my dad put on the indicator, since the flashing light on the dashboard was so small and really quite inaccessible to anyone but the driver.

In fact driving seemed like a terribly complicated activity altogether - you had to be able to look forward out the windscreen, backwards with *three* diffrerent mirrors, see into other people's cars to see which way they were going to go -- no chance I would ever be able get the hang of all that...

I loved Cowboy films but was never sure whether the 'Indians' were men or women - something to do with the long hair, probably. I just regarded them as something in-between.

As a four year old, I had been told that if you cut a worm in half, it would become two separate worms.

So, I decided to do the worm world a favour and I raided the kitchen drawer. Clutching the biggest carving knife I could find, I trundled out into the garden. I dug up all the worms I could find, laid them out on the patio, and proceeded to slice them all up to the size of rice grains.

My reasoning? I'd be doing the worms a favour because each tiny piece would become a new worm and then there'd be MILLIONS of worms!

Actually, looking back on this, I'm not so much staggered by my mistaken belief, more staggered by the extreme lack of parental supervision.

lying down on hot fresh tarmac is good for you - The Mum didn't think so
it's best to walk in a large snowdrift sans wellies and socks - The Mum didn't think so
cake mix tastes better before it's baked - The Mum allowed this one
Santa lived up the chimney, but only in late December - The Mum encouraged this
if you don't fall asleep on Christmas Eve, Santa won't come down from that chimney
my Mum, Gran and Aunty were immortal - two out of three is bad, there's only one left
the yard does go on forever...

Until at least my mid-teens I was convinced it was an adjective meaning "of or like Dracula".

Imagine my surprise when I discovered it is, in fact, derived from Draco, an Athenian law scribe under whom small offences had heavy punishments.

For quite some time I thought all French people spoke English, wore breeches and had pigtails and moustaches. I also wanted to be a menhir delivery man when I grew up. Wonder where that came from...

that my grandma was mum's mum or dad's mum. I thought mum simply chose a random old woman to be our grandma. I was happy with her choice though.

Until the age of around 12 (but might have been later) I thought dogs were the "men" and cats were the "women". An older girl explained the difference to me much to my embarrassment.

Aged five, I lay in bed and thought about time. I arranged the limited concepts at my disposal into a chronological order that went: Dinosaurs, Knights, Pirates, Cowboys, Star Wars. I remember reading Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne. It seemed implausible that I would ever be that age.

Aged nine, I lived in Thorpe Bay. There was a busy road nearby called Bournes Green Chase which ran parallel to a residential street. A broad island of grass separated the two roads, with a fence running down the middle, screening off the 60mph traffic on the Chase. I would cycle up to it and watch seagulls rising up from behind the wooden panels. Even though I knew very well that the estuary lay in the opposite direction, I imagined that behind the fence there was a beach – a broad expanse of sand – and that the noise of the traffic was the sound of the waves and peoples’ voices carried on the wind.

Toby and I had an argument in the playground regarding the colour of sperm. Toby had seen a program about artificial insemination and claimed that the frozen samples were green. Howard and I both maintained that it was white. I knew that the stories in the Bible were allegorical and assumed that the myth of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge was a metaphor for sex. I believed that after you had sex for the first time you would suddenly become aware of things that you hadn’t known before – not frivolous detail regarding the dimensions of the female sexual organs - but important universal truths that would guide you through life. I continued to believe this right up until the point that I had sex.

I decided that, every day, come evening, scores of workers opened manholes and slavishly walked up and down under Britain's roads, turning all the road lights on.

...is the key to success.

Until I realised that I disliked hard work more than I wanted success x