Candyfloss

Recently I had this new in paperback book that originally came out a year ago that's really for girls but I've always loved reading girls fiction as a boy.

Floss's parents are divorced, and she divides up her week, spending five days with her mum, her new stepdad and her baby half-brother. 

The other two days Floss spends with her dad, helping him to run his greasy spoon café but their simple arrangement is thrown into disarray when Floss's mum decides to move to Australia.

Making the difficult decision to stay at home, Floss moves in permanently with her dad and they muddle along happily together, surviving on chip butties and enjoying visits to the local funfair. But disaster strikes - Dad's money troubles catch up with him and they have to move out of the café. 

They're homeless - but can their new fairground friends help out?
This is what the story explores.

Comics of my youth

We all read comics, sharing between each other sometimes from the school comic collection for rainy break times.

We read these comics whenever it rained in our junior school and we were unable to play as they were kept in a big cardboard box and shared at break time.
Roy of the Rovers was a boyhood hero.

The Beano was massive and we loved to see Soppy Walter battling it out with Dennis The Menace although Dennis's dad would spank him as we all were.

The Dandy was pretty big too and I just loved Winker Watson and his wanglers, Corporal Clogg and Brassneck and Korky the Cat.

Football was mega and still is and back then this was what we all raved about as boys in the playground pack I was a member of. 

Here's another long gone we read:

War, football and boxing stories were just what us boys wanted and how!

That one's now gone the missed Whizzer and Chips in a late 1970's edition.

There was however a big issue in this era and it was around boys who liked girls things and I did so want to read openly girls comics because they provided what a feminine gurl like me also loved.

You may of got away reading them in private if you had a sister or knew a girl who wouldn't let on did to your class not least other boys cos physical abuse and bullying was common then.

As you can see while I loved to read boy comics a half of me was missing following all my interests meeting my own needs and that's a crying shame.

Transformations

 

It's the great enigma really.

On the one hand you know you love dressing all feminine even if people say you're a boy and yet truthfully you just crave the humiliation of being made to wear an uber frilly outfit complete with accessories by a dominant even if you may not need much of a push to put it all on.

It's the aspects like that which really underscore the reality: I am a sissy gurl

Reading up on the past

One of my stronger memories of my official childhood is reading, not that I was what you might call a good reader but we did have a fair number of books in the house and stored in a big wooden toy box were some of mine, usually those my Mum thought I'd outgrown.

A good example of which is this one which was really a book for seven to ten year olds that stayed in that box well into my mid teens.

It's a series of two short stories of a group of young children called Benji, Jack and Jane plus dog who have to move together with their parents and their adventures through play with other children and grown ups.

Its very innocence, the clear lessons shown about appropriate behaviour such as owning up if you do something and clear consequences for wrong doing are woven into a fun set of adventures.

Another is The Three Golliwogs, no longer print but last available as The Three Gollies in the late 1980's.

Really this is a compilation of short stories, originally printed in Sunny Stories from 1937 to 1942. The first compilation was in 1944 under the name The Three Golliwogs, in 1968 showing them having fun.

Many of us had gollies, playing with them back then.

It was really that I before I knew the terms I was looking for even in my mid teens as what I now know as regression was even then a part of what made me different than most of my peers not least in my own mind I WAS that younger child.

It was why I kept the books and puppets from that era.