Back In The Day

Hi, I’m Bec from Out Of My Tree… currently sitting and giggling like a fool because I am here… Guest posting…  It’s so… popular, and pretty… and people read it.  There is a touch of fear here, so if I start to babble just give me a slap, okay?

When I began to think about what the hell I was going to write in this post it sent me into such a tizzy that I had me a little drink of something nice… Which either turns me into a giddy attention seeking whore who thinks she can dance or makes me all nostalgic.

Now, you’ll be delighted to know that there is currently no music around here so nostalgia it is!

England is going through another one of those ‘wait for it… sunny… no… rain… grey clouds of doom… bright and blue and cold… ooo… sunny’ summers again.  The kids in our neighbourhood will be playing on their Wii’s and X-Boxes or being taken for days out to Camelot or (gawd ‘elp us) Blackpool Pleasure Beach instead of doing the things we used to in our youth.

It’s a shame that they don’t play tennis in the middle of the road and nearly hit every car with well practiced 2.5 miles an hour quite impressed that I hit the ball over head serves and then have the joy of running down the hill chasing the ball before it landed in the brook, or sneakingly jumping into ‘moody man’s’ garden to grab the ball before he kept it.  (Oh, we know that you have hundreds of our tennis balls – we know!

It’s a shame that they don’t have mass water fights anymore, where you end up so soaked that all of your clothes stuck to your body and you dripped on the floor while Mum yelled about your ‘catching your death’.  Ah, you didn’t care, as you knew that the same thing was going on in all the other houses.  Well, you’d only gone back to reload! Then at the end of the fight you would lie on someone’s lawn, or on the so hot pavement and watch the water evaporate in the haze.

It’s a shame that the kids won’t be able to leave the house in the morning with a few hastily made sandwiches and wander off into the scary woods over the railway track just to see if you can still see your house from the top of the hill (yes, I could) and then come back just before tea… which would be eaten hurriedly before disappearing out again to go off somewhere else before the sun set.

(That’s me in the middle – last day of School Stylin’ and yes, that’s a thin white plastic belt I’m wearing.)

Summer holiday’s were always sunny – there wasn’t a cloud in the sky for the whole six weeks, and there would be dramas (A fancies B who is in love with C who hates A as D likes her) which would all devolve into a huge row and then be made up over a ‘99’ from the ice cream van which would always send the crowd of kids scattering only to come back a brief ‘Ice Creeeeeeaaaamm!!!!” filled moment with cash carrying Mums and Dad’s just happy that this would mean at least two more minutes of happy quiet as the munching replaced the sounds of playing.

Happy memories of sitting on the school field (after finding the gap in the fence at the bottom) watching the skateboarders jump off anything they could, or reading a book, or planning an end of summer show and rehearsing fervently without thinking of any of the logistics of doing it and having at least one more argument because SHE thinks she can sing better than anyone else (well I could!). I was that special kind of tragic where I had transcribed the entire of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and had parts for everyone – that particular production fell apart because Robin and Marian (who were ‘going out’ at the beginning of the summer) had a breaking up… It had nothing to do with the fact that an over zealous Little John put his staff (broom handle) through his own window during a practice fight.  Nothing at all.

But it’s a real shame that all a lot of kids will remember about this summer is the rain, or that they got a really score on their computer games or got another 50 friends on their Bebo or MySpace accounts.

I, however, will never forget the look on my friends faces when I walked out of my house and declared that my Mum had given in and we could turn the garage into a den, complete with an old couch, a stereo, a fridge and lots of half pots of paint to cover the walls.  I was a God that summer… especially on the one day it rained!