h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thanks, All!

And thanks for slipping a bit of the text into the illiostratrion,
Jimster!

We love this entry. Makes so much sense too (I found myself identifying with a few of the situations here).

We had to change the title a bit, just to make it easier for people to find when browsing, but we still love this.

I identified a little as well, Jimster. I'm never sure what to make of things like that - am I a Little Professor or just a "normal" person who talked incessantly about dinosaurs when younger?

Amazing entry, really! I have to say this is one of the best I've seen in a long time.

Sometimes I get it right.

My family was artistic on my mothers side and I seem to be autistic on my own side. I wonder if we are not only Little Professors but also Peter Pan's, not growing up like other people? As kids, we created plasticine men and made a second world war battlefield out in the backyard. My brother made a plastercast pillbox for the Americans and I made a cardboard tank, with a doweling rod canon and cotton reel wheels for the tracks. We used darts as representing bullet wounds and shots. Grenades were match heads, wrapped in silver foil. You had to say grenade, before throwing a dart that was supposed to be one. My brother had also made a pretend river with a bridge over it to the pillbox. As the game progressed, it became obvious that the tank was too big to get over it and darts, representing bazooka shells finished it off.

We also made paper men and played different characters with them, including cowboys with guns that came out of holsters and gun belts that were also worn by the figures as well as waistcoats. My eldest cousin also made a robot that was hollow and filled with beetroot juice, to represent blood and had a cellophane panel so you could see it. One year he built a mummy for Halloween, wrapped in bandages, with a hole in its side and a real dead spider in the gap. It also had ping-pong balls for eyes.

Other juvenile insanity included sticking bangers in cow pats, putting clay round 321 bangers and tossing them into a pond and even trying to make even more dangerous fireworks by wrapping toilet roll tubes round bangers in several layers or putting plaster of Paris round them and making them look like grenades. Other japes included firing rockets across the local mere at each other, with various friends in tow. How we weren’t arrested, God knows.

Nature also captured our imagination. Off to the local pond for frog spawn or newts. Trying to grab lizards basking in the sun or out eating ants (them, not us). Discovering slow worms in the compost heap. Bringing home toads as big as your fist (where have they all gone now?). Going tadpoling or out with fishing nets, trying to catch minnow or sticklebacks. Finding a Millers Thumb in the river (not a real one - a fish called that because of its big, flat head). Chasing butterflies across meadows or watching them hatch. Playing truant by hiding in the ditch, until your mother shouted over the fence that she could see you and it was too late to go to school now, so you might as well come out of hiding. Looking across the cornfields at night and watching the light of the trains in the distance or in daylight, seeing the wind turn the waving corn stalks into a swishing see of yellow, then jumping over the fence after the harvest and finding hiding hares to chase or hedgehogs to pick up.

The rest of my extended family seem to have grown up but not me. As my eldest cousin said I was always me. It seems this fascination with life never died with me and it may have made others think I was odd but it has always lead me to be creative and quirky - and yes, not homeless but unemployed for half my life and creating ideas nobody else can see the use of (4 websites full of it, plus stuff posted on Pinterest boards, Facebook, Twitter and countless forums).