Weekly blog challenge – another double header – a skill I wish I had and weirdest thing fiction has taught me

Time for the Wednesday Weekly Blog Challenge and yes I did miss last week and again I’m sorry. We were on a roadtrip down through NSW and Victoria and while I wish I was organised enough to pre-write these blogs so far that hasn’t been the case…maybe next week.

So the first one is a skill I wish I had but don’t…this will be short and sweet. I can’t sing. People beg me not to sing around them. I can lipsync like nobodies business but my singing sucketh so I choose that. I’d take being mediocre at this point – I don’t need a chair to spin for me on The Voice but people not running from the room would be much appreciated.

The second topic is The Strangest Thing I’ve learned from fiction. This’ll be short and sweet too becasue I no longer even know what I learned from fiction and what I learned from non-fiction, or school or TV or my parents (well most of the Catholic knowledge in my head is definitely school and my parents but beyond that it’s all a wild card).

I was an early reader. I was reading before I started school (my mum was an infants school teacher) and I was a voracius reader as well – nothing new there either. I read widely and I read often.

So do I know about the Civil War from Little Women or did I already know and then read the book? Did I learn about Australian wildlife before or after I read Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie? I really don’t know.

There are a lot of extraneous facts in my head but pinpointing where they all come from is hard. And what’s the weirdest in the mix, that’s even harder to answer.

What I do know is that reading opened up world to me I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to – knights and castles, adventures on the high seas, life in New York in a turn of the centure tenament or life in a quaint post-war English village. Some of those things may not have been weird but they were weird to me in suburban Sydney in the 1970’s.