"Get that Friday feeling."

Today is a momentous day. This blog is in fact is a momentous blog. This is officially the 10th blog I have written. Perhaps i should open a bottle of champagne, or at the very least a new bottle of shampoo. So what shall we be exploring in today's momentous blog? The topic itself should be a reflection of how important today's blog is, the epitome of my writing career, the pinnacle of my blogging ability.

Which is why I have chosen to write about the humble Crunchie.

I used to dislike Crunchies. Yes I was a heathen, without taste or style, unlikely to progress past the lower echelons of Tesco's employment programmes despite years of hardcore sugar stacking. But I simply didn't like them. And then something changed, a miracle, whereby what had once been odious to me and had remained unwrapped in a Cadbury's Christmas selection box for months on end until an overwhelming desire for sugar would force me to unwrap it, ram it down my throat unchewed and instantly regret it became something of an addiction. Now the very smell of a Crunchie is enough to melt my insides and send me dizzily into a state of ecstasy, let alone the taste of its delicious, cinder toffee centre. God, I'm getting tingly just talking about it. Is it right to feel this passionately about a confectionary item?

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure but we'll get there, don't worry.

What interests me about this change, besides opening up a new possibility when stood in a newsagents agonising on how best to further expand my waistline, is the fact that it proves something that I never believed when I was younger; that you can grow to like something. I had always thought that this was a clever ploy used by adults to coerce you into eating something that was in fact inedible, but slowly and regrettably I am coming to realise that what they said was entirely true. I remember my first sips of beer, pretending I loved it and could drink a whole pint whilst in fact thinking that someone had just poured the contents of their blocked drain into a glass and served it to my unsuspecting father. Indeed, I remember asking what whiskey was like and thinking someone wanted to kill me when my dad gave me a sip, cursing as the burning liquid scorched it's way down to my stop like some kind of aqueous dragon. Both of these things I now thoroughly enjoy, alongside many other delicacies I would never have delighted in a few years ago, and the fact is that on this occasion as on many my parents were completely and utterly correct; your tastes can change with age.

This goes for many other things as well. Go back two or three years ago and I was a committed communist (insofar as you can be committed at the age of sixteen). I riled against a capitalist system I had very little understanding of and believed I lived under a corrupt political system that I could barely comprehend and wasn't even old enough to vote for. A lot of these beliefs I still hold today and would argue passionately in favour of an improved welfare system and more democratic style of government and election. But I know see that, despite the beauty of a egalitarian utopia, one cannot escape the fact that that is indeed what it is; an unachievable dream, a flawed goal, an enigmatic ideal. Call me cynical but, whilst mankind continues to be flawed and imperfect (which is a polite way of saying "we're all buggering it up"), the creation of a perfect world is impossible; the best we can hope for is to aim high and expect to achieve a little less. This is so hugely contradictory to my old beliefs that you would be forgiven for thinking they were two different people, but they were both me; just at different stages in my continual development as a human.

And so I guess in a roundabout way this blog serves as a contrast to my last; looking forwards as opposed to behind. If I have changed so much up until this point, how much more can I expect to change? Will I discover that certain things are fundamental to my being, or is my character to be eternally shaped, moulded and manipulated as I continue on the path of life? This sounds deep, and possibly like the words of some ancient philosophy professor who, after years explaining Descartes and Socrates, has given up and now lives with his cat, a bottle of rum and a collection of amusingly shaped vegetables. But I find the prospect both interesting and exciting; I like to think that age will add to as opposed to erode what constitutes my being and that, with a little humility, life will only become richer and more beautifully mysterious. As much as life is scary, every so often its promise gives you a thrill that's as addictive as a drug, and the only way to approach it is to embrace it and be prepared to leave behind the things that are slowing you down.

Even so, I won't be trading my Gameboy for a golf club too soon.

"The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence..."

Adult life is a scary thing. I've been an adult for around a year and a quarter now and I couldn't be more terrified if I were shipped out to fight in Iraq with nothing but a toothpick and a copy of 'The Express' (I guess that's not far off the modern British army's armaments). Life as an adult is confusing, fraught with worries and stress and centered largely around whether or not you have enough money to buy this Wispa or whether you should save it for an extra five minutes worth of electricity. Call me melodramatic and pretentious, but in my own small way I've been confronted with the real world and I have to tell you it scares the shit out of me. I don't like it. I have a house that I have to pay for and look after, I have a future that has to be worked towards beyond whether or not I get more than eight out of ten in my French vocabulary tests and I've come face to face with the realities of modern life. Upon visiting Barcelona recently I was propositioned by a prostitute and offered drugs within five minutes of stepping outside the safety of my youth hostel. Had I been ten years younger I would have been unlikely to have been offered so much as a lolly and a toy dinosaur, if I had been allowed out beyond seven 'o' clock at all.

And that's why the topic of my blog today is childhood. I'm sure I'm not the only one who, confronted with the way the world can be, retreats into a corner with a teddy, sucks his thumb and reminisces on what it was like to be a few years younger and without a care in the world beyond when the next Pokemon game comes out and whether my Mum will buy it for my birthday. Perhaps I am. But I like to think we're all a bit nostalgic for that lost innocence, and just for a few short paragraphs I'm going to revel in it rather than feel ashamed. Who knows, I might even make a car out of Lego or a fort out of cardboard boxes in the process.

Being really little must be ace. You can't be that conscious of it when you've got one hand in a plant pot and the other picking sweetcorn out of your nose, but it must be an epic time of life. I wish I could learn to walk again. There's something in the self-confident yet almost entirely uncoordinated walk of a small child that boasts of having conquered the greatest hurdle of them all and remained unscathed beyond the odd bump to the face as you trip over a discarded Mr Potato head. It's somewhat similar to the strut of a successful businessman actually, and when you think about it the comparison isn't too big a leap of the imagination; both use speech that no one understands but themselves and throw a tantrum when, whether because of a caring mother or government restrictions, they're not allowed to take a risk that's beyond their capabilities.

And then being, say, 10 must be really cool as well. My little sister's 11 now and has just started secondary school (I feel old just thinking about it; I remember when she used to run around the house wearing no more than a hair bobble and shrieking like Amy Winehouse after a particularly heavy night) but back when she was 10 she was the queen of her world and loved every minute of it. You're old enough that you're at the top of your school, you're a politician of the playground and lord of the lunch queue and yet have the prospect of secondary school, with the promise of Bunsen burners and cutting up a sheep's eye, looming ahead of you full of excitement and anticipation. And on top of that you can still watch Spongebob, find it funny and no one thinks you're emotionally immature. Brilliant.

Even being 13 or 14 is pretty cool. Girls are now no longer diseased and are actually starting to get attractive (before you reach for the phone to call social services I speak from the perspective of a 14 year old here). You can now go out with them and, joy of joys, you might even snog one on the back of a bus! You're old enough to pick on someone smaller than you at school, but not quite big enough to have spare any kind of thought for things that matter. Jesus, when I was that age we had SATs to worry about; kids don't even have those these days the lucky gits!

You have to question at what point did life switch on. When did that innocence disappear, where the only money you had to worry about was your £1.50 worth of lunch money and things such as sex, drugs and alcohol were things you only heard about when they were in a song or when some lads at the back of the class would shout them out to annoy the teacher and snigger? When did the world start to take on darker shades? When did you stop having to ignore them and start having to care about them? As I have said more than once in these blogs I don't intend to come up with answers, and it's a damn good thing, because on this occasion I haven't the foggiest what the truth is. All I know is that I still have my gameboy and I'm going to play on it.

I will, however, shut the door when I do it.

"I know a mother-in-law who sleeps with her glasses on, the better to see her son-in-law suffer in her dreams."

I had a dream recently in which I woke up to a giant tortoise outside the window. On further inspection I discovered that it was accompanied by a killer whale and they were lounging around in a pond in my girlfriend's back garden that doesn't exist in reality . Not long afterwards they were joined by a whole host of creatures ranging from grizzly bears to meerkats. One has to question what I had been eating/drinking/snorting just before bed to have had such a bizarre night's entertainment.

Dreams are very odd things. Despite the fact that we all have them psychologists still have no idea why. I used to think that it was your brain replaying and sorting out all the stuff that had happened in a day, but such a concept is highly disturbing when you think I once had a dream about marrying my guinea pig in Hawaii. Some people think they are the expression of suppressed desires and thoughts, our subconscious if you will, but again either I've got a bizarre fetish for South American rodents or Snowy was just particularly appealing when I fed her that morning. The truth is we really have no idea why we dream, but at the same time we wouldn't be able to function without them. They're a bit like the appendix of the mind: no-one knows why they're there but they must have or have had a function once upon a time.

And it's possibly the mysteriousness of dreams that make them so fascinating. Whole books are written on interpreting them, inevitably leading to the conclusion that you fancy one of your parents and want the other dead regardless of whether you dream about Hamlet or of the donkeys at Skegness. Films such as the recent 'Inception' explore the idea of the dreamworld and what could happen if we were able to manipulate them for our own devices. Superstitions have surrounded them since time began (apparently dreaming about ham means you will lose something dear to you). The very fabric of dreams is intriguing, and our experience of them can shape our day. Dreams can be so realistic that we wake up in floods of tears or with the urgent need to contact Winston Churchill, and yet at the same time can be so bizarre that we recount them at every dinner party thinking they're witty anecdotes when in actual fact the guests listening want to have you hung, drawn and quartered. They can take place in a familiar setting and with familiar people, yet still have odd twists such as axes over your grandmother's mantle piece or a lack of gravity. All in all dreams are weird. What a pathetic conclusion.

If only we could record them, like we used to record 'Antiques Roadshow' for Nanna on VHS because she couldn't work out how the "television box" worked. On waking they so often slip from our grasp and this is massively infuriating. There have been occasions where, on describing the least amusing of two dreams, I've forgotten the far more hilarious one and can only remember that it involved the Statue of Liberty and a packet of ginger nuts. This obviously leads to much embarrassment and seems such a shame, particularly when you have really enjoyed a dream. I've had adventures I would consider worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, or at least £200 from 'You've been framed'. And perhaps if we could record and replay what goes on in our heads when our bodies have shut down we would have a greater understanding of why we dream and maybe even comprehend better the human mind.

On second thoughts that's maybe not a good idea. The implications for Snowy could be dire.