Try Telling This To The Kids Of Today

Finally getting round to binning the last of the compulsory child seats for the car over the weekend, got me thinking.

When we were kids we had no child seats. We had no fcukin seats at all in the back of my Dad's van. We used to roll around in the back every time he turned a corner.

And when my two brothers & I rode the one bike we shared, we had no helmets, we didn't even have any shoes on half the time.

Even though all the shops closed at 5.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death.

We shared one bottle of pop with our mates and NO ONE actually died from this.

We could collect old drinks bottles and cash them in at the corner shop and buy chewie or sweets. We ate loads of white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in them, but we weren't overweight because...... WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when it got dark. No one was able to get hold of us all day, and we were OK.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps of wood and some pram wheels we'd found, and then ride down the hill, only to find out we'd not bothered with brakes. We built tree houses, caught sticklebacks and lit fires. Loads of fires.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, satellite TV, no videos, no DVD's, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no 99 channels of abject American shite on TV to chose from, no personal computers, no internet and no MSN.........INSTEAD WE HAD FRIENDS. We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and got chased by the bloke down the road for nicking his apples.

And we could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time. We got pellet guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays!

We walked to and from school on our own or with our mates, we never got a lift anywhere, EVER. Sports Day was competitive. If you were no good you got beat and accepted it. Our teachers used to hit us without fear of getting sued and losing their jobs.

And our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' or 'India'. We wrote our homework out by hand, and we didn't pass our exams by simply copying what the teacher wrote on the board. Neither did we go on exchange trips to France, squeeze in a weeks skiing with the school in Gstaad before jetting off to the Med for a fortnights recharging of batteries before another hectic high-pressure school term. If we'd have took a form home asking my Dad to set up a direct debit so we could go to Switzerland next year he'd have told us to sod off. We went to Rhyl, for the day.

Bhah.