To this day, I can’t actually tell you what The Moo looked like. I was very very small, and I was so terrified of it that I always ran inside and hid until it had gone past. It was a hideous monster, like the panic-inducing hoover (vacuum cleaner) which reared up with a terrifying roar every time my mum leveraged it on its back wheels to turn it. The Moo was much much worse than the hoover, because it was truck-sized with enormous tubes that made an even more scarily deafening racket as it lumbered up our street. Of course now I know, thanks to Google, that it was a cleaning truck that aspirated muck through its tubes: a vacuum sewer cleaner to be precise.
But what about the dougalist (pronounced doogalist)? To this day I don’t know what a dougalist ‘really’ is: it’s a sort of twisty pointy sticky-up thing that I would see on churches and cathedrals in northern England. Dougalist, in some way I couldn’t (and still can’t) explain, embodied what for infant me was the essence of, well, this twisty pointy thingamajig.
What words did you make up when you were small?
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