My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets.

Most kids when they are young regularly go on summer holidays. When I was a child we spent most of our holidays at a place called Wilsons Promontory. Really cold there, but beautiful, a National Park that is the southern most tip of mainland Australia. When we were very young (under 10) we went in the summer and I have very scant but fond memories of this, as most of our extended family in Melbourne would also go. As I said I cannot recall much, but there was much time spent at the beach, going for walks, bike riding, hunting down wombats and roos with our torches and playing card games. I remember helping one of my uncle's fishing in Tidal River and I remember the time a wombat came into our flat and we fed it corn flakes. The worst thing that ever happened to me (which I cannot remember thankfully, and would have been about seven?) was when I was doing something you are always told not to do - run with a stick in your hand. Sure enough, my eyeball got in the way, blood ensued and before you could say "Ahoy, matey" I had an eye patch the rest of the year. My eye-sight hasn't been the same ever since. When we got slightly older, we changed from summer to I think autumn as it was probably cheaper. I didn't enjoy these holidays quite as much as the extended family wasn't around, so we had to scamper around in search of alternate fun. It was around this time that I was spending much of my holidays in the general store. Quite bare bones compared to the fully stocked over-priced supermarket there is now, but it had a resident wombat living underneath and I could waste my time reading comics and magazines. I think this was the first time I layed my eyes on Starlog magazines and Spider-Man comics. Having been a big fan of Star Wars, these magazines caught my attention as there was always something on Star Wars in them and there was news of another upcoming movie. This was the beginning of the end for me, and it began what would become a twenty five year plus obsession with movies. This was where I first read about Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi fighting on the side of a volcano during the "Clone Wars". This was where I first read about upcoming films like Raiders, ET, Tron and Star Trek II or films I wasn't even allowed to see at the time, like Alien, The Thing and Blade Runner. This was my internet as a child. There are a couple of reasons I bring this up. One, this obsession lead into one of the mainstays of my life: Minotaur book store. I think it began life as a small shop tucked away in the back of the still-existing Midcity arcade and was where I got amongst other things, issue 1 of the Raiders Of The Lost Ark comic book adaption. The majority of my childhood it was a two level store in Swanston Street. The ground level was movie books, magazines and videos etc and the second level was comics. This was the store I went to most nights after school (I was going from one side of the city to the other each night, so hey, it was on my way home anyway), and if I wasn't buying a comic, magazine or video for myself, it was for someone else at school. (I even wagged school once, just to go and get the latest issue of Frank Miller's Dark Knight series). The store then split into two: the movie stuff moved to a store in Elizabeth St, the comics to a store in Flinders Lane. This was the store where I got an autograph from Glenn Robbins btw. They then moved to a three(!) level store in Bourke St, next to the Village Cinemas. They were here when I first started working in the CBD in the early nineties and this was when I first started buying Region 1 DVD's in the late 90's. In the early 2000's, there started to be many problems with gangs and drugs in the area so they moved into a large cavernous single level down some escalators which don't work in Elizabeth St (almost opposite where they used to be) and have been there ever since. Despite my howls at their inflated prices I continue to frequent there, but only occasionally of the purchase (mostly comics). Two (didn't think I'd get to my second point did you?). The end of an era is over (finally) with the last Star Wars movie. Equally exhilarating and infuriating, it at least fulfills my childhood obsession and puts it under lock and key once and for all (unless Lucas changes his mind yet again about the trilogy of trilogies). And thirdly, my current jaunt to Sydney has unearthed a most fabulous shop called Comics Kingdom, which not only has most of the stuff Minotaur has, but has possibly the most impressive back issues of various magazines etc. I have ever seen. My first visit yielded an original Cinefex issue 7 which covers the life of Willis O'Brien, the inventor of stop-motion animation and his greatest creation, King Kong and a Cinefantastique covering Scanners. My second visit, more importantly, yielded 9 issues of Starlog ($1 each) from 1979 to 1984 (plus the latest issue of Cinefex which covers surprise, surprise, Episode III). "The circle is now complete". I, of course, will devour these magazines over the coming weeks. Hopefully the magazines will bring back good memories of my childhood, something which I sometimes miss, sometimes feel I'm still living, and other times thank god I've moved on. Or have I... (Goodnight, Bubbles)