I won't go through the whole eight years right now. I'll just discuss Robin and Barney's Wedding, aka the night Ted met Tracy.
Actually, that metaphor is not half bad, considering that Robin and Barney's wedding was on May 25th, 2013, which was my eighth birthday. This story is set about two months beforehand.
It was a rainy or sunny or cloudly afternoon. As hazy as my memory of that time is, it must have been World Book Day because there was a book sale in the uncharacteristically tiny library of my school. My mum and I walked into the large, old building which back then seemed to me like some sort of castle.
She told me to find a book. I wasn't much of a bookworm then. Perhaps it was the stigma. I wasn't a nerd, I couldn't be. The movies were about the pretty girl in pink, the girl who walked in the middle of the group, the girl all the boys fought over.
I was none of those things, but I yearned to be.
I was the youngest of three, naturally the last to everything, and I realise now I just wanted to be special. It's hard to leave the person in the middle out.
I looked around, not even trying to find a reading book. Instead, I picked up something called a "Puppy Journal". It was about the breeds of dogs, had a short little story about kids going on a scavenger hunt to find the puppy they'd begged for was the prize, and a lot of room to fill in details about yourself and your dog. My dog, I think nearly three years old at the time, was not really a puppy anymore, but eight years later and she still looks and acts like one.
My mum wasn't pleased with my choice, and in her own scan of the room she had found a book with a purple cover and engraved silver title. I knew then she picked it up only because it had my name on it. The protagonist shared my name. Mum had no way of knowing, and neither did I, that purple would become my favourite colour and I'd prefer silver over gold. I don't think the book had anything to do with that, as life-changing as it ended up being.
I read the blurb of the book, and it seemed interesting enough and my mum made the deal with me that she'd get me the puppy diary if I read the book. So we took them both home and I scribbled with my terrible handwriting random details about my Fifi and about the imaginary second puppy I wanted in the diary and cast the reading book aside. I did read it eventually. I must have been bored or just figured I should get it over with.
So I started, up in my top bunk in our little flat in London, and might have finished it in one sitting. I can't exactly remember. But the book, it covered everything: acting, circus, friendship, love. Teenagers saving their friends from a fire set by a traitorous sibling. A sweet first kiss at the end, between two best friends who had grown up together and been subtly falling for each other the whole way through and, as I later found out, six books before that.
And the writer didn't share our name - mine and the protagonist's. I'm not entirely sure why that was what turned the gears in my head, but it made me realise that the writer had made it all up.
Thank you, Lyn Gardner, for choosing that name, for writing the book which made me go, "I want to do that." And thanks, Mum, for picking up a book just because it had my name on it. And everything else.
I'm now sixteen, the age that the protagonist of that book was by the end. I still try to be in the middle. It's hard to leave the person in the middle out. But I don't like pink very much anymore; I like purple. I wear the same three silver rings almost every day. My bookshelf isn't as large or full as I'd like it to be, but in my defense I mostly borrowed books from the library during the periods I read a lot.
I don't always read a lot. Sometimes I just don't want to get hooked, because once I pick a book up I don't want to put it down. Sometimes it takes a while to recover from a heartbreaking ending. I'll never forgive Veronica Roth for my year-long book slump. My current bookslump is because I keep refusing to buy more books (I don't go to the school library anymore and am too introverted to go to a public one) until I finish the ones I've got, but the writing styles of those writers make me reconsider if I actually like reading. I do, but these two ladies just don't write in any way I like.
I don't have the puppy journal anymore. Which makes me feel quite guilty, considering factors like money which just don't occur to a young child. But - since the tragic and mysterious loss of my thick-paged picture books about Princesses and peas and sick kittens - that book, Olivia's Curtain Call by Lyn Garnder sits proudly on my bookshelf as the book I've had for longest. The book which changed my life.
