I wish I had a gift. You know like those people who can paint, sing, play beautiful music or even do the splits. I’d just like to have one thing I could do better than anyone else. I suppose the people that go on the X Factor, or BGT think they have a special something – even if it’s only knitting. I can’t think of anything I could say was a unique skill.
I am just average. I loved art at school, I really enjoyed it and thought I was quite good, my paintings got put up on the wall at primary school. When I went to senior school there were loads of girls who were far better at it than me, who were really gifted at it. I just managed an average ‘O’ level. Even though I went to grammar school, I just scraped through and so always felt I had to try and keep up with those who had passed their 11+ with flying colours.
I loved writing and spent hours as a child writing and illustrating my own ‘books’. Then as an adult writing short stories and articles and papering the downstairs loo with the resulting rejection slips.
Another of the things I like to do is cooking, I’ve catered for events for friends and family and even our town’s mayor making ceremony and I’ve made birthday cakes for lots of people. Then I look at other peoples’ that they post on their blogs and mine look pathetic.
Perhaps I would have had a gift for skiing, if I’d had the opportunity to do it as a child? I thought I might have been a gifted rider, enjoying my weekly hour at the local riding stables, but my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a pony so I never really got the chance. I could have been a good actress, I loved being in plays and joined our local amateur dramatic and operatic groups, but there were no local drama schools near us and there was no way Mum & Dad could send me away to one.
This is why I think it’s so important to give our children as many opportunities as we can and encourage them where they show any skill or aptitude at something. Too often though, it comes down to cost. When you have four children, there is a limit on your finances, as well as time, to let them all try something that they decide they hate after two weeks, or after you’ve just bought the necessary kit.
I am very good at remembering phone numbers, I know all the ones we’ve ever had as well as all those of friends and family. I don’t need them stored in the phone. I can also recite all the registration plates of the cars we had , both my dad’s when I was a child and my husband’s since I got married.
Even now, I still know all the words to songs that I sang at school including; “There was a man who had a wife, nickety nackety noo, noo, noo, She couldna’ bake and she couldna’ brew, nickety nackety noo, noo, noo!” Perhaps that is my ‘gift’?!
My lot 