“Work, children, home, debts, bad back…do you often look around and wonder what
the hell happened? Adulting; that’s what happened my friend. It’s rife and it’s not ok.
As if life isn’t accelerating at an already dizzying enough pace (HOW have we already
arrived at autumn!) I don’t know about you but I fully intend to wring every. last. drop. of
our painfully-slow-to-start summer. I feel it is earned. After all, I’ve just spent six weeks
of the school holidays watching my teen humpfing around and when I enquired as to
what was ailing my little freeloader, it transpired that her ‘life was rubbish and boring’.
I had to muster all of my reserve to prevent the ‘in my day’ monologue but still …
I remember my youth like it was yesterday.
Summer holidays were spent just wondering around with absolutely, and I can’t stress
this enough, NOTHING to do apart from the annual family holiday. Me and my brother
banging into each other like ping pong balls, seat-belt free in the back of the car. A mix-
tape on repeat for the entire journey; unless the tape got chewed up and someone had
to get the pencil out and wind it back in … and that was considered fun! Now, you can’t
venture out in the car for more than a half an hour without the kids having to download
an entire box set, lest they spontaneously combust from a serious dose of ennui.
Depending on the length of the journey, toilet breaks were taken in lay-bys and no
sustenance was provided apart from the occasional boiled sweet from the tin. It is now
standard practice to stop at the services and fill up on ‘car snacks’ before you have even
hit the dual carriage way and with said snacks costing the same as a case of Chateaux
Neuf De Pap!
Ignorance is bliss they say and I think I agree. Days out swimming in rivers full of God
knows what (nobody cared), buying cockles from roadside stalls with absolutely no sign
of a food safety rating, sandwiches were mainly that, sand … plus jam or some sort of
meat-themed paste, sat sweating in unison, inside a Tupperware box with some warm
fizzy pop to wash it all down. Genius really; the food was so dull we couldn’t wait to run
off or just skip the meal altogether in favour of playing in the dirt somewhere.
Then, in the blink of an eye, it was time to cover your school books in wallpaper, shove
some cotton wool into the toes of your new shoes and head back to school.
But these were fun times, carefree times and unincumbered times and, although
nowadays, I often can’t remember why I have walked into a room, I can recall these
happy times with giddy clarity.
Simple times indeed but will our teens remember the great Tik Toks they posted in the
summer of 2024? I think not…unless it went viral!”