Can You Imagine?

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday May 7, 1998

ANGELA WEBBER

THEY appear without warning, then remain in your household for years. They're always in the backyard, yet you never glimpse a face. You put up with their mercurial temperament week after week, yet never hear them speak. They are, of course, your child's imaginary friends.

Imaginary friends are brilliant creations of whimsy. Part playmate and confidante, part scapegoat and alibi, an imaginary buddy has unlimited power to do anything.

Mister Applehead can morph from hero to sook and back again in the blink of an eye. Robinson Ruggles can stay up all night because his mother lets him. Shirley Wurley never has to wash her hair or scrub her fingernails. She's brave, cool and more amazing than all the Spice Girls put together.

Fantasy characters like these provide hours of companionship for the under-sixes. And they give adults entree into the world of a child's imagination - an enchanting

landscape as yet untrammelled by the commercialism of everyday life.

However, as delightful as that can be, the reality of co-habiting with a phantom has a downside. How can you berate your daughter for eating the last of the chocolate biscuits when she alleges Mister Applehead is the culprit?

And there's no point pursuing it - she's got witnesses. The entire Applehead family is ready to make a statement on her behalf.

While the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides no figures on the incidence of imaginary friends, some pundits put it as high as one fantasy acquaintance per household.

And that's not necessarily because of children. Some men I know have been using the imaginary friend caper for years. He'll tell you it was their buddy "Phil" who kept them out drinking till 2am. They wanted to come home early but "Phil" insisted on another shout.

Kids have got it right: it's pretty damn convenient to have an imaginary someone who's always on hand to cop the blame.

Now, we adults need to conjure up someone who we can finger for stealing the car keys, forgetting to put out the rubbish bin, making the razor blunt and setting the video-recorder incorrectly.

But perhaps we need more than a fall guy. As a special Mother's Day surprise, each household could come up with someone to make our lives an easier and better thing.

Someone who's prepared to do the supermarket shopping, cook the family a gourmet meal, clean the oven, then afterwards read our user's guide to the new PC just so they can translate it into plain English.

My imaginary friend would be perfectly happy to go up into the roof with a torch to see what's been making those funny scratching sounds at night.

She'd be thrilled to leap out of bed at 5.45 on a wet Sunday morning, give the children breakfast and play Boggle with them non-stop till lunchtime.

Best of all, she'd be the sort of selfless friend who would be prepared to go through 20 hours of labour for someone else and, come summer, to go above and beyond the call of duty by volunteering to have my bikini wax as well.

Now that's not imaginary friendship. That's the real thing.