I’ve become obsessed with Radio Lab in the last few weeks and have taken to listening to them from the beginning. Today I listened to an episode on Stress made in 2007 which is, like all of theirs, brilliant in all sortsa different ways and I super recommend it. My fave part though was when they spoke about J M Barrie and his stressful childhood which, scientists or doctors or some shit have theorised, gave him some sorta dwarfism and that’s why he never grew taller than 5 foot something. I had a spy about it on wiki and they reckon

When he was 6 years old, Barrie’s next-older brother David (his mother’s favourite) died two days before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David’s place in his mother’s attentions, even wearing David’s clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time Barrie entered her room, and heard her say ‘Is that you?’ ‘I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to,’ wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), ‘and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it’s no’ him, it’s just me.”’ Barrie’s mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.

And now Disney’s Peter Pan and Hook are ruined to me forever because that is seriously fucked up. Oh my! So horrific. I just want to hug the poor boy.