- Kids who showed physical courage or a penchant for physical oddities: kids who could do hand stands or cartwheels, spit between the gap of their teeth with aim, move their ears.
- A canary yellow and earth brown curlicue spiralling out of an ice cream machine.
- Fantasies of bringing down the iron curtain through a love of tap dancing and Russian folk songs. Gene Kelly leaping about in the Moscow underground.
- Imitating the English sounds we picked up from songs by going watchiwatchiwa as if we were starring in an old Hollywood picture or a Technicolor musical.
- Very unhealthy and highly processed cakes packed in bright colour wrappers: my favourite was the Pink Panther, a deadly mixture of sugar and artificial pink colouring who would kill a nutritionist on sight.
- Older neighbours who kept to themselves and thus could turn into a “suspect” or a “mystery”.
- Dipping crisps into Fanta at birthday parties.
- The seasonal rain that befell Madrid in spring and autumn lifting the dust of the ground bringing the waft of soaked soil to my nostrils; the water settling in puddles that I could splash in wearing bright yellow Wellies.
- Sitting on the floor of my room reading a Just William story eating a Mortadella roll, squinting at the light flooding through the window.
- Bringing down the bags with the summer clothes from the storage space at the top of the wardrobe.
- The elegant and precise moves of the arm of a window cleaner at work; the squishy sound of the window wiper removing the soap and water.
- Redhead boys with green eyes and freckles. Clever boys who liked cinema. Boys who did not have a clue you liked them when you slagged them or ambushed them. Boys who you could talk about books with and be friends with and openly thought you were smart and secretly thought you were pretty.
- Making my friends laugh out loud. The physical effects of laughter: convulsions, wanting to pee, howling and squirting the drink you were having out of your nostrils, falling over your friend and collapsing with her on the ground.
- Wine gums shaped as blackberries and raspberries with little round nuggets of coloured sweet that you could peel off until you were left with their translucent innards.
- Visiting my grandmother and listening to her stories and the swish of her fan in the dark on a hot summer night.
- Watching my mother deseed a pomegranate knowing that she would serve it in a bowl as desert. The definition of maternal love to this day.
- Lying to my parents and pretending to go to sleep and throwing a jacket on the ground to cover the crack at the bottom of the door so the light would not shine on the corridor outside to be able to read when I was meant to be asleep.
- The squishiness of small packets of room temperature salted butter that you get with breakfast in hotels; its oiliness as I spread it on crunchy bread.
- The comforting contrast between the cocoon smallness of our apartment and the impossible height (to a child’s eye) of the tower blocks in my neighbourhood.
- Standing in a narrow bar with my dad for an afternoon aperitivo and drinking Schweppes lemon for the first time: my first conscious experience of sophistication.
- Being an opinionated, enthusiastic, imaginative, bossy, funny girl. Wanting to be, and believing I could be, anything: an astronaut, a film director, a writer, a dancer in a musical, a scientist. Being a girl before the process of gender socialisation was finished and I was led to believe that being a girl was a liability, an embarrassment, an impediment to just being as opposed to being self conscious.
- Wiping clean the dark part of a white and dark chocolate jar of Nutella and pretending I had nothing to do with it.
- Having no interest in coffee, wine, beer, spirits, smoking, or exotic foods but loving restaurants, waiters, reading through menus, proper milkshakes, slices of Iberico ham sliced directly from the leg and dropped delicately into the palm of my hand.
- Not giving a crap how I looked in pictures. Pulling faces, looking genuinely happy, bored, annoyed, blank, odd, in family photographs. What an array of expression my parents managed to immortalise. Actor who will play me in my photos as a child: Meryl Streep. Actor who will play me in my photos as an adult: Elizabeth Hurley.
- Dreaming that I was being chased by monsters and always managing to escape by hiding very quietly as their enormous legs flew over my head miraculously leaving me unharmed.
A Fistful of Olives 