Confessions of a Four-year Old

Yesterday’s musings on neighbours inadvertently threw up an old flame from my puerile fantasy world. Combine that with a bang on the head and suddenly I’m remembering the other influential women from my days of emerging consciousness. A four-year old surely does not have much to go on when it comes to the rational discrimination of beauty, so I offer you these four angels as pure forms, who appealed to me in an unmitigated manner, haunting my early childhood dreams. My wife says it is pretty clear what my ‘type’ was, but I had thought from a relatively young age that I could pretty much find a redeeming beauty in any face. I wonder now if those redeeming features in some way evoke the memory of a small part of these four faces. Looking at them now, together, for the first time in years, I realise that the primal attraction is undimmed. Looking at them in their current form, wearing the years most respectably, I think my four-year old self knew what he was doing. Anyway, with apologies for this bizarre turn (surely a result of a rattled brain), may I present Felicity, Agnetha, Deborah, and Olivia. Please bear in mind that I want to hear nothing whatsoever about Freud. If that’s your cup of tea, fine, but drink it somewhere else.

Then:

And now: