Can you remember when you were so small that you bumped your head on the kitchen table? When you had to stand on tip-toe to reach into the sink or washbasin? When you had to clamber on to the chair before you could sit down?

It is an adult-sized world. At fourteen or fifteen, most of you will be adult-sized — though you may still grow considerably. From the age of seven or eight the difference in size between you and an adult probably worried you little. But look for a moment through the eyes of the six-month-old baby in the pram down to whose level swoops with frightening suddenness the giant face and glinting, bespectacled eyes of a loving aunt, determined to print on its cheek a loud and outsize kiss. Or through the eyes of the toddler dragged by an impatient parent through the seething crowds of a department store, over feet, round hips, never knowing where it is going—or why.

The idea of seeing imaginatively through the eyes of small people has been used by several writers—many of you will know the first book, Voyage to Lilliput, of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In it, the Lilliputian Emperor— you can estimate his size from the fact that his horse is four and a half inches high—gives orders for a search to be made of Gulliver's pockets and an inventory made of what they contain:

In the right coat pocket of the great Man Mountain, after the strictest search, we found only one great piece of coarse cloth, large enough to cover the floor of Your Majesty's chief Room of State. In the left pocket we saw a huge silver chest, with a cover of the same metal, which we, the searchers, were not able to lift. We desired that it should be opened, and one of us, stepping into it, found himself in a sort of dust. Some of this dust flew up into our faces and set us both a-sneezing for several times together….

In his left waistcoat pocket there was a sort of engine, from the back of which were extended twenty long poles, like the palings before Your Majesty's Court….