Imagination

Although fantasy and make-believe flourish in childhood, they rapidly atrophy as one is moulded to fit the adult’s grey consensus of reality.

A child, out on a walk with its mother, suddenly points and cries out, ‘Look, a purple cow.’

The mother, perhaps rather tired and domestically harassed, snaps, ‘Don’t be silly.’

And then delivers the crunch line:

‘There’s no such thing as purple cows.’

So the child, a vagabond in the backwoods of rationality, is brought up to see the world in the prosaic terms of grown-ups and eventually forgets it ever saw a purple cow.

Now purple cows walk around unseen by anyone.

– Alan Fletcher