Whilst having a family dinner last night, the kids started once again with the old ,old question about “what did you do when you were little Mum- with no computer games, dvds and mobile phones. They still can’t quite grasp the fact that there were only three TV channels, and nothing at all on the telly in the morning and Sunday teatime. It’s at times like that they start to question whether we had electricity!!!

As I began my usual oration about “when I was young we used to play out”, I realised that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to tell them that- we used to play out in the streets till it was dark- only going inside for food and water, on most days we would play in the woods behind our house, roaming miles away from our street and finding all sorts of weird and wonderful things- and sometimes people!! Only coming back to inhabited land when we heard the call from one of our Mums, or the batteries in our torches were dead and our night eyes weren’t working properly.

Kids these days aren’t allowed more than two feet away from the parents, and the thought of them being in an isolated area with no supervision is enough to bring on a seizure in most parents. Certainly not able to tell them that we used to play ‘knock-a-door run’ on our long suffering neighbours doors. Kids do that nowadays and they’re most likely to be greeted with a three headed Rottweiler and then a court summons to the parents from the noise abatement society.

We would spend the whole summer holidays being taken to the river by our highly irresponsible older cousins, and return to our homes covered in doc leaves from all the nettle stings, dripping from head to toe and in the first flushes of hypothermia from the freezing river water. We would build impossibly dangerous go-karts out of old boxes and wonky wheels, set up tightrope wires from the garden trees-not a safety net in sight and best of all, get a gang together and build HQ in the garden shed- amongst the lethal array of Dads power tools.

So when my kids go on and on- and on- about how boring my childhood must have been I nod and agree and smile to myself with the memories of all the things we were allowed to get up to- and safe in the knowledge that they’ll never know.

Kids these days- don’t know they’re born!!!