A long time ago when the stars were newer, and the sea was bluer and many things were not quite as they are now; a young girl lived with her family on the edge of a wide, tranquil ocean.

The girl had bright eyes and red hair and a great many brothers and sisters. Her life was full of adventure and incident. The shoreline curved away from her house in an arc of gold. She would run with her mother and father across the wet sand, chasing sea birds as she kicked up salt and sea foam in her bare feet.

Despite all this, the young girl was sometimes sad. She had trouble remembering. As a baby, she couldn't recall being held in her mother's arms, nor if her father had made up stories for her as she lay in her crib. None of her siblings seemed to have this problem, they laughed and played and gave no thought to a childhood lost in distant memory.

Once, on her eldest sister's birthday, her father had blown up hundreds of balloons, balloons of every conceivable shape and colour and tethered them with silver thread to the fence that surrounded their front garden on three sides. A single red balloon had broken free and floated off into the sky.

Sometimes the girl felt like that balloon. Drifting along all alone with nothing to tie her to the rest of the family.

One day, as she wandered far from home along the beach, she heard a voice cry out - looking into the water she saw that a young seal had trapped itself underneath a heavy stone near the shore and was struggling to get free.

Without a further thought, the girl waded into the water and freed the seal from beneath the stone. The seal was so grateful that it stayed in the shallow water with the girl and they laughed and sang and named all the kinds of fish that came to see what the commotion was about.

But suddenly the girl remembered her predicament and sat down heavily on the sand and began to weep.

"What's wrong?" said the seal, who was able to talk, as is the way in these stories. The girl looked up, her eyes rimmed with red and began her explanation. She told it everything, how her childhood memories were lost in the mists of time and how she herself felt similarly lost.

The seal, tilted its head to the side as it listened. When she had finished talking it looked thoughtful for a second and then began to speak.

"Child," it said "you are mistaken. No one remembers their childhood in that way. The specifics escape us all. We forget the whats and the wherewithals - it's the feel of it that shapes us. You dived into the water to save me without a second thought. You learnt that from a lifetime of watching your parents put others first. You laugh easily and often, you know the words to a dozen songs and the names of every fish in the sea. You carry yourself with a confidence born of security. Your eyes sparkle when you talk of your family.

You didn't come by these things by accident. They were bestowed upon you - each gift a gossamer strand too fine for the mind to hold onto individually, but woven together they form a silver thread that tugs at your centre. That calls you home."

And the girl looked at the seal and knew that it was true. So with a final wave goodbye, she spun towards her family home, racing across the sand, kicking up salt and sea foam as she went. A blur of red, drawn home by a silver thread that whipped away from her across the bay.

We grow older and we forget: the exact rules of a childhood game or the very particular shade of a favourite toy. But these things are merely decoration, as thin and inconsequential as a new coat of paint. They don't matter.

My hope for us is this:

That our houses are full of song and story That our laughter comes easily and often So that we feel that tug at the centre of our being A silver thread to guide us home.