Another nostalgic post, from 2013. Not many of you have seen this before.
What is it about memory, that makes us remember summers as being better in our youth? Ask most people about the weather, and they will almost always agree that the summer was better when they were young.
Six weeks of unbroken sun, school holidays spent outside, with perhaps the occasional thundery shower, that helped to clear the air. Given that this might span a time period from 1958, to 1998, it cannot really have any basis in fact. Although I do not have the real statistics to hand, (and cannot be bothered to look them up) I am sure that we didn’t always have fabulous summers, with weeks of Mediterranean heat, and unbroken blue skies. So why is it that this is how I remember them?
Before we moved to Kent, when I was fifteen years old, I spent my summers on the streets of Bermondsey, a South London district…
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I am struck that even though we didn’t have bombed structures to remind us, the war was always very recent for everyone and the threat of another was omnipresent too. As for the summer, I mostly remember the variety of stitches and casts that appeared on friends. I rarely see kids with stitches these days. Maybe playing on phones is safer!
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Yes, black eyes, scuffed knees, and bandages. Everyone seemed to get an injury of some kind during the summer holidays. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
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Glad you knew what I was talking about. We called them “summer knees.”
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I used to play soldier with an actual gun stock. I would sneak around the neighborhood, and once even went down into a neighbor’s basement. I’d never met the neighbor. But back then, people weren’t paranoid like they are now. So if I’d been discovered, my intrusion would have had no consequences whatsoever.
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Very true, David. People were not so bothered about kids as they are now.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I do miss those days!!
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Simple pleasures, GP. But no internet, so we would never have met. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
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True, but I did have pen-pals.
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I had a Japanese pen-pal once. He used to write such badly-translated letters, I had to give up on him after a while, as I never knew what he was writing about. My French pen-pal came to visit, when I was 15. After a couple of years of nice pleasant letters, he turned out to be awful in person; arrogant, and rude too. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
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Never met one of mine. Maybe that was for the best, eh?
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I had a pen pal from Germany who came to stay with us as part of a student exchange program, and she turned out to be pretty awful as well.😞
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Snap! 🙂
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Yes, my childhood summers mostly seemed sunny! Except when we went camping, and the sun would vanish periodically!!
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I remember it always rained over Easter. But otherwise, my recollections are of unbroken sunshine.
Best wishes, Pete.
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And I remember the rain and wind at Damage Barton….damage by name, damage by nature!!
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Wonderful tricks our memories play on us! 😉
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I think it provides ‘comfort’, as we get older.
But there are the bad memory tricks too…
Best wishes, Pete.
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Yes better off forgetting those ones.
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