Fond memories of childhood

Now I may have spent too much time gazing through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I think I’m fairly safe in saying that as a young lad summer was a far better time then than it is today. As an adult about all we do in summer, is work the same amount, maybe enjoy a beer garden or 2 and occasionally, if the saving has gone well, take a well earned holiday. While it’s not exactly horrifying (well the work side is), it’s not quite as much fun as a kids summer.

Think about it, when you were growing up, still at school, summertime was something to genuinely look forward, it was almost as anticipated as Christmas. The following are just a few of the reasons why:

1. You had 6 weeks off school. 6 whole weeks with absolutely nothing to do, other than play daft games with your friends and be rarely seen in the house.
2. Every day seemed to be hot. It probably wasn't scorching every day, but I'll bet you probably spent most days in shorts and t-shirt, or whatever young girls liked to wear and you had a tan created by a sunbed or painted on.
3. Ice cream tasted better. Now this may not sound important, but summer is ice cream season and the better the ice cream the better the day! These days there's just too many varieties of ice cream and sometimes too much choice is a bad thing.
4. Trips to the seaside. Seaside trips were one of the great delights of being a kid, even though you saw the place at least a couple of times a year, the seaside town you visited always seemed a bit more exotic than your hometown. I was a Blackpool kid and of course Blackpool had the Pleasure Beach, but I'm guessing those who went to Brighton, Skegness and Yarmouth had just as much fun as I did.
5. No school. I know I mentioned it in the first point, but for a different reason. No school meant no lessons, no sitting in a stuffy classroom filling your growing mind  with information you'll likely never need (oh and how we learned the error of that type of thinking). For 6 weeks you didn't have to be structured, you lived almost by instinct.

How would a typical day go? I’ll have an attempt at recreating one:

8:00am ~ Wake up, realise you’re not in school, and actually get up without being dragged kicking and screaming from bed.

8:00am to 9:00am ~ Wash, brush your teeth, use Dads aftershave and try to scream at the shock of it on your face. Spend a while choosing your clothes, you’d want a pair of shorts that showed off the scars on your knees, war wounds were cool. Head off downstairs eat breakfast and watch cartoons.

9:00am to 12:00pm ~ Go knock on for friends, make sure a football is brought along at all times. You could play many games, and frequently did, but with a football you could either A) make those games more interesting or B) invent new games. A game of knockout* wall-y** was to be played before lunch.

*knockout was basically a kids simpler version of a knockout competition. A goalkeeper was selected and each person had to score a goal to proceed to the next round, one person was knocked out each round. The last round, the final, involved the last 2 kids and the winner was the first to score 3 goals.

**Wall-y involved finding a big wall and blasting a ball against it. You were only allowed to touch the ball once and that was to hit it against the wall. You had to hit the ball from where it stopped, or was rolling toward, and if you missed the target you were out.

12:00pm to 12:30pm ~ Dinnertime. You all congregated at someones house were their parents would make you all sandwiches and attempt to boost your sugar levels to insane amounts by filling you up with fizzy pop.

12:30pm to 5:00pm ~ More playtime, a whole afternoons worth of fun, games and lots of skinned knees. These were the best times of summer holidays, when you could have that whole afternoon to do whatever you wished without much fear of parental intrusion, that truly was heaven then. We had a little wooded area near our estate that we called “The Forest”, a lot of times we could be found in there, building dens, playing army and pretending we were outlaws after watching Robin of Sherwood.

5:00pm to 6:00pm ~ Teatime. One of only 2 times during a day when we were expected to follow a routine. Teatime was rigid, you were in at 5, washed and sat at the table ready to be served your evening meal. Either ketchup or brown sauce had to be at the table for tea.

6:00pm to 9:00pm ~ Back out for the final few hours of the day. This was the time for relaxing and serious debate; football, girls, who’d win in a battle between He-Man and Lion-O?

9:00pm ~ Time to go home. We had curfews back then and on pain of death we stuck to them! You didn’t want to be grounded for the summer for coming in late.

The following day would be more of the same, with few variations. Unless of course it was the day of the Blackpool trip, then it was a day for memories.

Those were the days; before responsibility, getting a job, earning a wage and having to be (almost) sensible. Wouldn’t you like to go back, if only for a day and see if the memories live up to the reality?