So I see it's me... and I'm still the child (Marillion)

Can you ever get back a piece of your childhood?

If you could - would you?

I got an email on the weekend from my comics guy in Wellington, telling me the 12 volume set of The Trigan Empire was in his store and could be mine if I wanted it!

I looked at the email for a few seconds and suddenly I got a glimpse of a parallel universe 'me', one whose mother had not disposed of the pile of Look and Learn magazines under 'my' bed when 'I' became a teenager!

Yes I've probably been watching way way too many Fringe episodes (we're up to the end of season four, one more season to go...)

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Brief back story: when I was growing up in Royal Oak, Auckland in the mid sixties, my paternal grandmother bought me Look and Learns every week. 

It was 1966 and I was 9 years old.

Look and Learn was a fantastic magazine for kids:

Look and Learn was a British weekly educational magazine for children published by Fleetway Publications Ltd from 1962 until 1982. It contained educational text articles that covered a wide variety of topics from volcanoes to the Loch Ness Monster; a long running science fiction comic strip, The Trigan Empire; adaptations of famous works of literature into comic-strip form, such as Lorna Doone; and serialized works of fiction such as The First Men in the Moon. The first major change to the contents of the magazine came in 1966 when it incorporated Ranger with issue 232 (25 June 1966). This amalgamation brought with it a number of comic strips including The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, written by Mike Butterworth and drawn by Don Lawrence.

The magazine gave me a doorway into a world of history - Kings and Queens and literature and places that I could dream about. And it had comics - which somehow forever legitimised them in my young mind.

Along with Look and Learn she would also have a copy of Shoot waiting for me on a Saturday morning when we went to visit (yes - every Saturday morning mum and dad would load me and Ross into the family Purdmobile and we would drive from Royal Oak, through Sandringham to Mt Eden - Reimer's Ave by Eden Park to be exact. Ross and I would troop in and while we loved seeing Deedoo - Harry Purdy, my grandfather, we would never have the same bond with Grandma - no feelgood kids name for her - Christina Purdy was always 'Grandma'. She would give me the latest copy of Shoot (a British football magazine) and Look and Learn and that would be me for the duration of the visit!).

Back home at 18 Korma Ave., I'd go through that doorway and be lost in my fantasy world of, among other things, The Trigan Empire.

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Suddenly that email miraculously managed to take me back to my pre teen self. My thoughts turned to my mum and dad and, well, I got a little overcome actually.

Thinking that I could recapture a glimpse of that person and that time when I had both my parents was pretty overwhelming.

I wrote back a quick OMG - YES! message to the comic guy in Wellington and now I'm waiting for the courier to deliver a bit of my youth back to me.

Yes - you can (get a piece - just for a moment)!


Love and peace - Wozza