3:05pm Wednesday 9th December 2009
By Sharon Griffiths
When you’re looking back through the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, it’s easy to see your childhood as perfect. But don’t kid yourself...
AH, those glory days of childhood when children didn’t spend their days hunched over computers and TV screens but were out and about playing games in the fresh air.
A television documentary, Hop, Skip and Jump, has unleashed a flood of nostalgia.
And they were great days. I am ancient enough to have had a Famous Five-type childhood, being allowed out all day to roam wherever I liked as long as I didn’t annoy the neighbours and was home in time for tea.
We played hopscotch and skipped to wonderful rhymes, rode our bikes for miles and played cricket until it was dark. We learnt to plan our own days, make our own rules, get in and out of trouble and learn to cope with minor disasters and the weird old man who used to watch us swim in the river and offer to help us get dry...
It wasn’t just healthier, we learnt all sorts of social and coping skills along the way.
But – and there has to be a but – there was always trouble in paradise.
Like the time my ten-year-old cousin clambered across a fallen tree across a river – with his baby sister on his back. She fell in. We pulled her out, thumped the water out of her, dried her off, bribed her not to tell and thought it was a great joke.
The law of the jungle prevailed.
Lord of the Flies isn’t entirely fiction.
The youngest or weakest were always the ones tied to the tree to be shot at in cowboys and Indians. Or dumped in the nettles.
Or dared to swing on the fraying rope over the sharp rocks and deep rushing water.
It has always been a tricky one that – the fear of the physical challenge, or the greater fear of the mocking boys blocking your escape route back home. A lot of children in those apparently idyllic days, spent a lot of their time feeling frightened – usually of other children.
And there’d be no use in complaining to your parents who’d just push you out of the door again and tell you to get on with it.
Most of us learnt how to negotiate the rocks and currents or childhood, to cope with the challenges and to stand up to the bullies or avoid confrontation.
But quite a few didn’t – and bore the physical or emotional scars for years.
So yes, though I am sure it was a better, healthier, happier and more useful childhood than that experienced by today’s children, let’s not kid ourselves it was perfect. It wasn’t.
Except, of course, in memory.
FORGET the Botoxed and give us the grown ups. Older women – too often sidelined and invisible in real life – are the must-watch stars of television. Just when we’re mourning the death of actress Maggie Jones, otherwise known as the splendidly caustic Blanche in Coronation Street, we have a treat to look forward to.
Yes, a two-part Christmas special of Cranford – starring Judi Dench (74), Julia McKenzie (68) and the baby Imelda Staunton (53), who says that none of them would have got the parts if they’d been Botoxed out of recognition.
“These are women who’ve got history in their faces. Hard women,”
said Dame Judi, clearly not to be messed with.
When so many programmes feature older women with identikit, unnaturally smooth, fixed faces, what joy to find some real character at last – much more interesting.
AMAN has been banned from a public library in the Midlands because he smelt so awful.
Isn’t it wonderful that it is so rare that people notice? Even 40 years ago he would have just blended in with the background. Hard to recall now how grim it was.
People smelt. When people smelt sweet and fresh you noticed. Most just smelt a little stale. Others were rank and stank. Many people still didn’t have bathrooms, or hot water.
Even the fastidious rarely bathed more often than twice a week. My teenage daily bath habit was considered, frankly, weird if not obsessive, if not unhealthy.
As was my mother’s insistence on clean clothes every day. In the Sixties, a work shirt was often expected to last a week. There were few washing machines and in any case, clothes weren’t so washable.
For time travellers going back more than 30 years, the biggest shock would be the smell of the great unwashed.
Oooh – hot summer days on a crowded train. Lovely.
Art and literature have made great contributions to civilisation – but let’s not forget the difference made by the daily shower and the easy care wash cycle.
ISN’T the Turner Prize winner wonderful?
And when did you last think that?
After years of cows’ heads, unmade beds and elephant dung, not only is Richard Wright’s gold leaf fresco lovely to look at, beautiful and delicate, it is fleeting too. Once the exhibition is over, it will be painted over and gone forever.
When so much art is revered just for its apparent monetary worth and investment value, what great a change for something to be recognised just for being beautiful.
BEING lonely and unhappy could more than triple a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer, according to new research.
Well, that’s really cheered us up...
YOU know sometimes you hear things and you can’t really believe what you’ve heard? Well, I’ve just checked.
Yes, I really did turn on the Today programme and hear the BBC’s Evan Davies playing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on a comb and paper. Bizarre but brilliant.
And more entertaining than the share prices too.
OH dear. Mothers, fed up with their daughters being pressured to wear pink have started a Pink Stinks campaign and Justice Minister Brigid Prentice has climbed onto the bandwagon, claiming that letting little girls wear pink is “funnelling them into pretty, pretty jobs”.
No. Little girls who wear pink are quite likely to turn overnight into Goths who wear black. Or even grow up to be quite normal, balanced and ambitious. Unless they’re Barbara Cartland.
And in any case, I’ve yet to see a tiny pink princess slapping down the credit card at the checkout. If you don’t want your daughter to wear pink, then don’t buy it. You’re the grown up – stop blaming everyone else.
Dear Sharon,
WHEN my children were small I didn’t go out to work and money was in short supply, so I made many of our own Christmas cards and decorations and presents too, mainly foody things like chutneys,
biscuits and sweets.
The preparations were busy, but I enjoyed them and the children enjoyed helping. Thirty years later, we still use some of the tiny Christmas stockings I made for the tree. Once I started back at work there was no time, so I just whizzed round the shops like everyone else.
But now I’m retired and have a little more time on my hands and, with all the family coming for Christmas, I have had a very busy few weeks sewing, cooking and baking. With no time pressure, it has been immensely enjoyable and for the first time for many years I am really enjoying the build-up to Christmas. Perhaps when you have more time, you will too.
However, I haven’t been tempted to make my own wrapping paper. I agree with you on that one.
Janet Clarkson, Darlington Dear Sharon,
WITH regard to the letter in Backchat from Edward Ford, I think I can better it.
Some years ago when Co-op milk tokens were still used, I called at the Co-op to buy 100 tokens when milk was about 8.5p a pint. “£9.52,” the girl said (sorry it was a girl). “How much?” “£9.52,” she repeated.
“I don’t think that is right,” I said. “Oh yes,” she said. Looking at her tables, which were in dozens. “Nine dozen, that’s 96 and 4 more to make 100.”
I had to point out that eight dozens were actually 96, but I hadn’t the nerve to explain about moving the decimal point two places when multiplying by 100 to get to £8.50. It may have been too much for her.
Eric Gendle, Middlesbrough
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