Marnie Walters
We’d been driving through the Cambodian countryside for seven or eight hours and I’d become restless from sitting so long. Wriggling around to get comfortable, I slipped the shoulder strap of my seatbelt over my head and stretched out as well as I could. The Hilux was brimming with road-trip supplies: backpacks, camera and laptop bags, water, tropical fruit, even a whole roast duck. Next to me in the back seat, a young mother held her new baby girl, shifting her from arm to arm. She did not speak English and I had long exhausted my limited Khmer, but I smiled over at her and considered offering to hold the baby. If the mother’s arms ached she hadn’t noticed, there was nobody else in her world as she gazed lovingly down at that tiny sleeping face. I didn’t interrupt them.
As a child of the 70s and 80s I was raised with the idea that women could (and did) do anything, and always eschewed the ‘traditional’ feminine trappings of makeup, skirts and heels. As I got older I became aware that this slogan was frequently understood to mean that women should do everything, including juggling work and family, but it was not until I started thinking about whether – and if – I wanted children that I fully realised the extent to which social attitudes towards motherhood remain among the most potent and pervasive constraints on female (and male) identity and freedom.
As a nine and ten year old I spent six months in the local Children’s Hospital in Aberdeen. Rheumatic fever was one of the nasties at that time, and a number of the children in the ward were victims, all of us on bed rest, the treatment at that time. One method of self-amusement was reading. The Dimsie books, by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, were among the one or two books a week that my favourite aunt brought in for me.
Much has been written about how the arts and humanities can contribute to our understanding of life, but little (if anything) about the positive effects of video games. Having been an avid player of World of Warcraft for ten years I would like to write about the lessons of how to live well that I have gained from spending my time in this activity (as of this moment: 224 days, 19 hours, 20 minutes, and 40 seconds on my main character or ‘main’).
When I was a child I discovered three authors who have voyaged with me through life. What a debt of gratitude I owe these women who have strengthened, enriched, educated, supported and amused me for so long. I have since found other authors, some considered ‘worthier’, and deeply enjoyed them, but in difficult times I return to my old friends of childhood and reread them with undiminished delight. I don’t believe that the secret of the power is merely nostalgia. It’s something much simpler: they work. I take them like medicine. In fact I prefer them to any medicine I have ever experienced.