The Disregarded

Reading about Mary Norton's wonderfully imagined Borrowers again I'm struck by how much of the power of borrower-mythology - and it obviously is possessed of an extraordinary imaginative energy that transcends the details of the novels - has its roots in an awareness of how strangely powerful the disregarded becomes once it moves to the centre of our attention. And you can multiply this by ten for pre-adolescents. Do children still explore? As a kid I spent a fair amount of time looking for stuff on the edges. We went hunting for discarded bottles, I remember, on the grounds that if you found enough of them someone would pay you for them.

Derelict buildings were like magnets to us. And the idea of finding an old air-raid shelter and going inside was a version of going to the promised land. And tunnels! The idea of coming out somewhere else at the end! And secret passages! In those days when I still had an imagination I used to dream of these, and the chamber at the centre of the network where all the wonderful stuff lay dustily waiting to be discovered.

Here's a useful exercise in keeping the mind alive: each day try and notice something that nobody else pays the slightest attention to, and invest it with life.