The absolute very first time I went to the fair was in the mid 70s when I was old enough to be short-changed by the guy on the dodgems and mugged by the hook-a-duck lady as I made my way home (at least I think she was mugging me). I ate so much candy floss and so many toffee apples that I was violently sick which is a pretty anti-social thing to do if you're on the Big Wheel at the time though I suppose it would've been even worse on the waltzers.
In the days before instant entertainment on mobile phones, computers & satellite TV channels, we had to work hard in the 70s & 80s to make the most of our free time…which was often considerable because schools in those days tended not to put on the countless after-school clubs which allow parents to go out to the pub, grab a donner kebab on the way back and still get home before their kids. Instead, you'd be kicked out onto the streets soon after lunch once the teacher taking the final lesson had got too bored to carry on. There was no such thing as pick-up time anyway. You walked home. It gave you a far better chance of getting into trouble on the way.
Finishing so early meant our primary leisure activities tended to be outdoors. It was our naïve old-fashioned way of avoiding child obesity but we’ve obviously developed far more sophisticated strategies since then (like trying to ban kids from eating Hula Hoops and drinking Coke - ingenious). We'd play ‘jumpers for goalposts’ games of footie, do wheelies on our Raleigh Chopper bikes, hop & jump our way up the hopscotch grid and back again, launch ourselves between two whirling skipping ropes and bounce up & down on big orange space hoppers (which admittedly could be done indoors as well but it was far more exciting to try it on the road outside your house especially if, like me, you lived on a hill).
I also went through a phase of building balsa wood planes and taking them up the ‘Rec’ to try them out on the boating lake and, if you’re wondering how you try out balsa wood planes on a boating lake, you’ve clearly never loaded them up with gravel and used a strong elastic band to send them over the shipping lanes in kamikaze raids. We didn’t have safe spaces in those days so, if you took your brand new model ship up to the Rec and it was bombed less than a minute after you’d placed it carefully on the side of the lake and pushed it gently towards the middle, then you only had yourself to blame.
Back then, you couldn’t text anyone to see if they were free and you only had one telephone (that’s what we called the landline) which your older sister would almost certainly be using all evening. So, if you wanted to check if your mates could come out to play, you had to bike round to their house and ring the doorbell, hoping that their mum would answer the door and not their dad who tended to ask you inappropriate stuff about your own mum ...although at least it wasn't about your older sister.
If there was torrential rain (a shower wasn’t severe enough in those days for our parents to call us back in), we’d have to find things to do indoors instead. Like the telephone, there was only one TV in the house and so we could only ever watch what the whole family wanted to. In my home, this usually meant period dramas (Poldark, Upstairs Downstairs) rather than cop shows (Sweeney, Professionals, Starsky & Hutch and ‘who loves ya, baby' Kojak) so it was a relief when Atari came out with their home video game systems (remember that tennis game with the amazing true-to-life graphics?) for us to play in the comfort of our bedroom….until we realised that we had to connect it up to the TV set and so were in the same dilemma as before, competing with the Onedin Line which, as far as mum was concerned, was a losing battle right from the outset.
We didn't know at the time but this was the start of a slippery slope which would take us from family nights watching TV together via Atari tennis contests with our parents and then the odd game of Pac Man in our local cafe or chip shop right through to the anti-social behaviour of teenagers today who lock themselves in their bedrooms for several weeks at a time, refusing to engage with the outside world until they've managed to work out how to defeat the toad-like creature which is blocking their progression to the next level of Artemis Halo Death Stalker 6.
When there was a TV programme we didn’t want to watch (highly likely in the 70s & early 80s with only 3 channels available, one of which was BBC2) we’d read instead. Admittedly, this often meant comics & magazines - Beano & Dandy, Jackie & Mandy, Smash Hits – which were meant to be delivered with our newspapers by WH Smiths (they used to write our address on the cover just to stop us from cutting out the picture and blu-tacking it onto our bedroom wall) but usually ended up in a hedge at the bottom of the street after the paper boy had finished reading them.
We’d always be sent to bed far earlier than kids that age today (who throw a wobbly if they're asked politely to head upstairs any time before midnight) but at least we'd be allowed to read a book for 20 minutes or so. My favourite stories were Stig of the Dump, the Narnia series and anything by Roald Dahl. I still think that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the only book I’ve ever read twice, assuming that 50 Shades of Grey doesn't count. I tried reading the BFG when I was a bit older too but only because I thought it stood for something dirty.
Another alternative to the telly was playing board games which, unlike domestic pets in the 70s & 80s, weren’t just for Xmas. We’d often have a cheeky game of Scrabble when Dad came home from work which was most fun on the nights when he’d had a few beers beforehand and would forget how to spell words like ‘tanker’ and ‘rugger’ which my older sister and brother would find terribly funny and our mum would get very upset about for some reason.
Thinking back on this topic, I'm amazed at just how many activities we found to keep us occupied in the old days (I've missed tons I know - playing kiss chase with our Action Man & Barbie dolls, treading on subbuteo figures, swapping Brooke Bond tea cards, throwing sticks into chestnut trees for conkers, earning bronze/silver/gold patches to sew onto our swimsuits) but also how many of them we did with our family and friends rather than on our own.
And, now the kids are off our hands, work's starting to ease off and we're getting ready to enjoy all this free time again for the first time since our youth, we could do a lot worse than dust off the scrabble, head down to the boating lake with our balsa wood planes (if either of these still exist), grab our sick bags for a spin on the waltzers or dig out our old space hoppers for a bounce down the nearest hill. We might want to give footie, hopscotch and skipping a miss though - I'm not sure the knees are up to it anymore. Same with the hook-a-duck lady to be honest.
Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...CARRY ON FILMS
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