The moment of your childhood that seems the furthest away

It's not as though I really remember, it's more like I remember remembering, but I can't say how old I was, maybe 3, and being at my grandmother's house and looking down into a big sink. I also seem to remember going swimming in her pool, but since there are slides of that event that my parents have, it seems more likely that I just remember the slides. I'm 35 this year, and I'm sad to report that events of my childhood seem very remote indeed.

Earliest ever memory is me sitting on a high chair in the kitchen in Hawaii eating some kiddie pasta and my dad coming in the room and smiling at me. God knows how old I was! A definite distance, but hey.

I remember this sudden, bright light. Someone smacked me on the ass and I began bawling. This was Saturday.

Me on a beach, climbing some wooden structure, chasing after my brothers. I was probably two.

I learned to talk at three, which is very, very late for a child. So I have a handful of memories, such as this one, that I remember like a silent movie. Unnervingly quiet and alien. I once thought of this as my earliest memory, but there are perhaps others. Looking up from my changing table. Being in public, unable to talk. Staring at a cartoon face, trying to see it as a face and not a collection of shapes. Christmas. Television. The sky.

When I try put these memories into words, I think I'm being false to them. Through language, I am stretching a memory so it fits everything I know about myself. If I don't, it feels like someone else's. I know I embroidered spurious details onto this memory when I was a slightly older child. It was down in a beach by Battery Park, right by where the World Trade Center was. This was a ludicrous notion. I don't know why I believed this.

Friday already a blur for you, Dan? You, me, a bottle of wine...

drowned wasps in the lime- juice in my pewter mug at the picnic in the sun- drenched garden by uprooted stump of the tall tree that fell

sitting at my high window with my feet poked out of the metal child-bars, watching freisian cows moving near the glow of the moth-trap in the back field a quarter of a mile off: you could only see their white patches, which were not cow shaped but HORRIBLE MONSTER shaped

eating over-fried onions on bomfire night and throwing up violently in mom's bed a while later

I still remember falling down the well at 2-3 years old. I remember my baby brother fall out of his crib and break his colarbone, He was about 9 months at the time.. :( I also rmember my sister getting hit and dragged by a streetcar.She was 3 :( I was about 4.

When I was 8 or 9 there was this girl named Alissa of the same age that I did everything with...caught grasshoppers...she taught me how to ollie my BMX onto curbs...one day the conversation turned to masturbation and she explained how she did it....stuffed animal between her legs....so I went home and tried it...worked for me....busted many nuts that week...problem was, this is how I continued masturbating till I turned 13 or so when I was talking about wanking with my male friends and I naively told them my style...they laughed for hours...I almost killed myself....

Um, that didn't answer the question correctly at all (but just for clarity's sake, I did stop getting my rocks off 'the girls way' with dolls after that humiliating day....but I still keep my eyes open in the malls for those Paddingtons, baby...)

Real answer: pool party, age unclear, I was the only kid who couldn't swim, party thrower's mom organizes game where she throws handful of quarters into pool and kids dive for them...i'm standing like a chump, picking them up with my toes....i'm doing horribly....I try a few times to go under but only come back up instantly coughing with murky vision...friend's mom (who was quite graceful and fuckable IIRC) smiles, winks conspiratorially, throws bunch of quarters directly right at me, I catch them.....never felt as patronized in my life....the next summer I took swimming lessons....which was no picnic either because my schoolmate Cassie was in the level ahead of me....besides feeling overshadowed, I noticed she was starting to grow tits....shit was bizarre to me...I couldn't really concentrate...still passed, though, got my lifesavers level III in fact.....I conquered all, nigga! What!

I remember the cots we slept on at nap time in pre-school..age 3 maybe

To give a real answer (and to ignore Ned's SAUCINESS): I remember pinching my finger in the closet door of my parents' bedroom when they were looking at purchasing their current house. I was two.

A few things. I'm told I was a late talker too, but when I started SENTENCES came out. I remember creeping down to the basement at 7 am to ride on one of those horses on springs when I was about two, having a nosebleed at roughly the same age, making 'hooves' by jamming my small fists into Dixie cups, the naps-on-mats at nursery school thing, and being asked at four to count down from 100 by an anaesthetist as she affixed a black rubber gas mask in an operating theatre, registering a sweet almond smell as I counted 98...and everything went black.

I remember being washed in the kitchen sink. I must have been 2 or so. I'm not sure if this story makes people go "awwwwwwww god love you" or "awwwwwww GOD LOVE YOU THATS TERRIBLE, YOUR POOR FAMILY".

Awwwww god love you. Didn't everybody get washed in the kitchen sink as a toddler?

I remember my dad hoisting me up on his shoulders in the kitchen and sitting me on top of the lime green refrigerator. I was higher up than anyone else in the family and I felt very powerful. Then I got really scared and I looked down and my 8 million brothers and sisters were dancing gleefully around the kitchen, laughing and pointing at poor little me stuck up there. They'd all been cheering me on a minute before. Then Dad came to my rescue. I guess I was about three.

My childhood seems awfully distant now I have the NatWest bank adding £40 to my overdraft whenever they bloody well feel like it whilst I have no means to pay it off. 22nd birthday present = bankruptcy, by the looks of it.

earliest memory is the blazing sun, dad and mum on either side of me holding my hands, dad holding a radio, walking along the beach, Castor Bay. I think of the shooting scene in L'Etranger as having the same kind of orange light and heat haze as this memory.

My relatives all pointing their fingers at me and laughing at me at a party. I was probably 3.

Hi Ronan, Don't feel bad. I bathed all of my children in the sink and had a hand pump at one side. ( I had to heat the water by kettle.) I've been there.

Hey Gale :), maybe that's why Ronan is worst poster LOL!!

My mom and dad in matching scary clown outfits on Halloween. My dad yelling something at a judge and the judge said, 'take him into custody!'. My hippie babysitter getting fired because her longhair friends came by uninvited and banged on our door and yelled and frightened us. My mom telling me that Charles Manson wouldn't come to kill us because he 'likes children'.

My entire family eating at Mr. Steak, my little sister newly born and crying all red-faced in her high-chair, me eating an oreo cookie. I was 2.

Mr. Steak?

and to ignore Ned's SAUCINESS

You cannot ignore that which you hold most dear.

Three or four years old. I was still living in Antwerp. I was playing with the other kids in the kindergarten. Is it a real memory or a replica of it? DOn't know.

elephant, sydney zoo.

Food related: Getting my hand stuck in a tin of rice pudding.

Taking a red pepper out of my mums shopping bag and taking a big bite out of it.

Chucking my dinner on the floor, I would not eat Cassarol (sp?)...it landed splat face down.

Though, alot of my memories, now appear in my head in third person, i.e I see myself doing things, rather than events playing themselves before my eyes. So, perhaps some of my memories are the result of someone telling me...you did this or that. Though, I have this sort of memory recall about recent events as well. Kinda weird.

Robin, I think I might email you my response to this question privately. I have quite a lot to say about it but some readers here might find it depressing :(

My earliest memory is of organ music, colored light, the smell of candlewax and incense, being held by someone who was NOT my mother. My mother is of the opinion that this was my baptism at 6 months.

Playing Goober & The Ghost chasers at my counsins house at Christmas with a new torch and bumping into the chair legs. Would have been Christmas 1975 (since the visits to family go by clockwrok) I was 2 and a quarter.

I was washed in the sink too! I remember there was a pink squeezy thing that was absolutely FASCINATING to me when I was still a little gurgling me in a cot. Also I played in a WIGWAM with the boy next door AND I had a nurses outfit! I also had a fisher price record player with lots of coloured vinyl! I wish I still had it. I also remember the hill where we used to live just before I started playschool and it was FECKING HUGE. Of course I went back and it was a tiny slope. Children are GRATE! I wish there were more adverts from a babies eye point of view. Pampers - THERE IS THE POTENTIAL! Are they the people who do the KISSOMETER TESTED ad? Babies = CUTE, paedophilia = NOT AT ALL. Ew.

I fell in the mud at Bushy Park. And I had a bath in the sink too!

I remember having a lemon yellow toweling baby grow and stealing the headphones from my parents' stereo and wobbling around the room with them pulling my head to one side because of the weight.

I remember my mum having a huge red umbrella that I used to turn upsidedown and fill with cushions and beads and pretend I was a rabbit princess escaping from something.

foolishly cycling around the edge of a shallow pool in a park and falling in. i say pool, but it was more a mass of algae and stink. i came home looking like junior swamp thing. any memories earlier than that are too unreliable and mediated through other people telling me what happened rather than a clear 1st person memory.

Vague recollection of being in a doctor's waiting room as a total baby, that I have pondered since a toddler as my earliest memory.

Moving around when I was young means that I know for sure I have memories from before 6 months old as we moved away from St John's Wood and I have a few memories of specific events there that could not have been polluted by return visits. I think the fact that I have such early memories means my brain has never really developed. Or it was just highly developed back then.

I don't have any of my very early memories left - my brain has obviously taped over them with useless facts about music. Don't let this happen to you kids.

My earliest memory is of reading a book on my own for the first time. It was called 'Lord Rex: The Lion Who Wished' and I had just turned 3.

My earliest memory is of being in a hospital (I was born prematurely, and was an incubator for the first weeks of my existence). I remember a green haze.

Probably the time I saw my sister (who was one, I was two) standing up on a chair -- I can remember thinking she was going to fall and sure enough she did. She ended up cutting her lip open and there was blood everywhere.

I am a heartless fiend though, because I have very happy memories of that day because my favorite aunt babysat for me while my mom took my sister to the hospital, and she let me have some homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Visiting my baby sister in hospital at one year and ten months old. My grandmother took me - it was a very windy day, and all the leaves were blowing around. I wore a red tartan winter coat and a blue bobble hat.

When I saw my newborn sis I said "Ah bubba!" and poked her in the eye.

Our relationship has improved somewhat since then.

I remember being pursued by wasps on Wandsworth Common (they were after my ice cream), having been to hospital for some injection or other. Also drinking a bottle of 'Zing' (long-discontinued fizzy orange drink) from the cafe near the bowling green on Clapham Common. The drink seemed incredibly refreshing. Both these date from when I was about five. I could probably list hundreds more but won't. Are incidents like these from markedly hot summer days more memorable than those taking place on miserable damp ones?

oh oh david has just reminded me: i made a snow duck on the Campus at Welwyn Garden City w.my grandad, the year of the GRATE WINTER (1963? or 1965?)

Anyway the fountains had frozen solid. So Endless Summer = not all there was.

GRATE WINTER = January / February 1963

Strange thing is that I intended this thread to be about the *most psychologically / culturally distant* memory, not the earliest one, though there's still been some fascinating stuff here.

The memory from my childhood that seems the furthest away from this time is me creeping downstairs early one morning from my bed when I was about 3 or 4 as my parents slept. I went into the living room and there was a huge pile of old hi-fi equipment and boxes. I just sort of stood there for ages, just looking at it, while in my head this memory of a recent advert for what I think must was Sony Betamax featuring Bucks Fizz singing acapella floated around, replaying itself over and over again.

I don't think this is what you were thinking either but the most culturally distant episode from the rest of my life as a child was having my Canadian hippy mom take me to visit her boyfriend's family in Greenville, Mississippi. They had shag carpeting so deep I couldn't see my feet. A Black maid there was the first person who ever called me "sir", which seemed very strange to me because I must have been only 7 or 8 years old and she was my grandmother's age. While we were there, the Jonestown suicides happened and I remember sitting on the floor, knee-deep in shag, watching images of piles of dead people on the biggest colour tv I'd ever seen. I remember wondering why they kept talking about Kool Aid. Did Kool Aid have something to do with it? Had I been served poison at birthday parties all my life? Sitting in that strange place watching those strange events, it seemed like I might never be able to go back to where I'd come from.

distant in time - big nasty dog dtealing the sunday roast from the basket at the bottom of my pram. This will have beem sometime in the 1960's, which does make it quite culturally distant too, I suppose. However, the prize for culturally distant = POWER CUTS & the 3 DAY WEEK. Back in the early 1970's - 3 day wee was GRATE!!! we didn't have to go to school. Power cuts were just unremittingly grim. Both of these things seem like s.th. from a completely different world/era

"3 day wee". Oh phuck.

This thread is some of the nicest reading I've had in some time. Thanks.

I kind of sort of ripped it off tangentially for a thread on ILM called MOM and POP and POP, I hope some of you will contribute there.

i don't know my earliest because i can't order my early memories, and this annoys me.
plus my childhood memories are confused by the influence of the photos and film (not much; about 10 minutes of super-8 from about 1979) from then i've seen.
some of what i think are the earliest memories =

sitting in the car with my sister telling her i could see jesus, which was one of those blobs of colour you see after you've looked at bright lights

my friend leonie and i being bathed in plastic tubs at a campground

at a friends house touching the stickingout paint on a pollockish spray painting and weird indescribable tactile/visual sensations from these paintings

feeling pleasure that i was alone at kindy, apart from the other kids who were sitting on the mat while i was at the tables colouring in a picture of an aeroplane

verbal fighting with the big primary school kids on the other side of the fence from my kindy

being on a submarine. very confusing memory for a long time.

some kind of robot-based character/mascot that came to the mall

falling off my grandads back in a swimming pool; sitting calmly on the bottom as he swam on not having noticed i'd fallen off, and thinking how interesting this was

being trapped in a toilet at my grandparents' farm and yelling and yelling for help

the smell of the pastry of the old pies we fed to the pigs on aforementioned farm

driving in heavy heavy rain

seeing "a giant" filling the sky during a lightening storm

I don't know what my earliest memory was. I think most of my childhood memories seem so far away from who and where I am now.

When I was 2 or 3 I woke up one night and thought I saw a huge cat on my bed. It was wearing clothes and coming at me with a big axe. I was terrified and ran into my parent's room, screaming 'Mummy, Daddy, there's a Chopping Pussy on my bed.'

I made them come and look and I refused to believe it had been a dream.

I was scared of the Chopping Pussy for months afterwards, and somehow tied it in with a fear of being flushed down the toilet or being sucked down the plughole when the bathwater was let out.