Memories of Childhood

Ahhh childhood no smartphones no internet I was lucky enough to have a trampoline and a little pool table , hours of hanging out with friends at my house ... unlike todays generation where people are judged by self worth on likes and follower counts .... great times

I was a Generation X child and as such didn’t have a tenth of the things that children today take for granted, but I wouldn’t swap my childhood for theirs for anything.

We called each other on real corded telephones and would actually talk to each other, we would have proper and meaningful conversations, we didn’t have IPhones or IPads, we learned to make use of what we did have, we were resourceful, we didn’t sit on benches having conversations by text as I see teenagers do nowadays...there can be three or four of them sitting there, and you won’t hear a single word being spoken aloud. We climbed trees, made go karts and risked our necks racing them, watched the girls go by, shooting the shit about the meaning of life...

We walked to a friends house and rang the doorbell instead of just texting from our car.

The lack of parental supervision, walking a mile to a mate’s house after wolfing down my tea and staying out until after 9.30 with the sun already having gone down and all I’d hear from my folks was “have a good time”?

No bike helmets...no stifling feeling of being wrapped in cotton wool, a get tough or die mentality.

No...I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

For a while around the ages of 9 or 10 we had a small building site near us. One night someone left the keys in one of the diggers which somehow found it's way into a nearby wall.

I wouldn't swap mine neither. I remember the great excitement of watching programmes about a machine you could have in your home that could do amazing things. Yes, the home computer but it was on an episode of HOW! in the late seventies that the ZX 81 was demonstrated by one of the presenters Jon Young(Prof.) along with Bunty James, Fred Dinenage and Jack Hargreaves. At that time it was black and white, looked very chunky on screen but it could do some amazing things if programmed properly. I saw an advert for one weeks later at £79 which although cheap by today's standards was expensive back then. I asked my Dad if I could get one and he seemed interested but then never mentioned it again. Years later for my birthday I got a ZX Spectrum and the rest was history(although my first encounter with that was a boyfriend of my sister who left me with his for hours-I was hooked!) The idea of typing something out for an hour would seem positively mad to today's teenager but back then it was thrilling and you wondered if you altered a line of code or added a different number or variable whether it would change the program and sometimes the results were astonishing. You felt very clever.

Going to the local play park which looking back was like a death trap. The slide was really high, no padding at the bottom or even grass, just rock hard concrete or tarmac.

A climbing frame which looked like it had been constructed from scaffolding poles.

Getting skinned knees and elbows (still have the scars on both knees now) was an inevitability and was like getting a badge of honour.

"ooh wasn't it, you know, small boys in the park, jumpers for goalposters, fat kid in goal, wasn't it, get a grazed knee, run home to mummy, kiss it better, wasn't it? Marvellous" Ron Manager

Even the adverts on the telly were better then. Actual thought went into the making of them.

The Milk Tray man..high diving off a cliff into the water, then swimming from a shark to a boat where he opens his case (oooh err) gets out a box of Milk Tray which he leaves along with his calling card...before diving back into the water having put a knife into his mouth...’And all because the lady loves....’

Or the man in his pyjamas sneaking down the stairs to get some R.Whites Lemonade out of the fridge..the ‘secret lemonade drinker..shhh’...

The R-Whites man was Julian Chagrin and I think the father of Elvis Costello(real name Declan McManus) called Ross McManus wrote and sang the song(Declan McManus) and the Milk Tray man was stuntman Gary Myers.

Re the emulator for Spectrum-mine is called Spectaculator. I am not sure why I keep hold of the games I really should get rid of them as the computer no longer works-I remember playing some games with the Kempston Joystick. I also have a printer and only a few years ago got rid of the revolutionary ZX Microdrive-they were great times.

(22-01-2019 02:40 )GreenMachine Wrote:  Re the emulator for Spectrum-mine is called Spectaculator. I am not sure why I keep hold of the games I really should get rid of them as the computer no longer works-I remember playing some games with the Kempston Joystick. I also have a printer and only a few years ago got rid of the revolutionary ZX Microdrive-they were great times.

if i ever get my desktop back up and running i shall get the emulator and games onto a external drive of their own as I think they are precious childhood memories that I wouldn't want to let go of.
Kids today would probably laugh at the graphics now, but to us who grew up with them will always think of them as being cool. I think those kids playing FIFA 18 will find the graphics of Matchday too awful to look at Minder was a ;articular fave game of mine as well and Daley Thompson decathlon never really ever cleared the high jump properly.

Even loved the TV series too - it was a family thing in our house to sit down and watch that together.