Remembering the early childhood home exploring a leisure lifeworld of crannies mirrors drawer knobs and corners

Taking as its starting point Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space which is about architecture and environment, this paper sets out to explore the deep recesses of the home. As Bachelard writes, out of the home spin worlds within worlds where it is possible to get caught up in the remarkable dialectics of “deep” that deepens and “large” that extends beyond all limits. Focusing specifically on the home of our early childhood in a way that will hopefully resonate with most readers, the main argument is that it shelters a leisure lifeworld comprising impressions of protected intimacy and immensities that flow from objects. Having employed a methodology that is underpinned by auto-hermeneutics and ethnography, the paper should be viewed first and foremost as an attempt to recapture something that vibrates at the edges of imagination in our early years. The paper should be viewed secondly as a reminder that the value of “otherness” in our leisure lives begins in the early childhood home because this is where it is first dreamt, discovered and invented. As the paper indicates in its final conclusions, to lose touch with this “otherness” is to lose something about leisure and living that is truly magical.