Fun and Games

Fun and games seem to be played by the children of today sitting down, usually in front of computer screens, playing expensive games served up to fill their young minds.  As a boy, life was far different for me.

My family was comparatively well off as the saying goes, but my parents expected us to make our own fun.  Our fun and games were therefore only limited by our imagination.  Our pastimes, as they were sometimes called, varied according to the season.

The summer holidays would see us boys making our go-carts.  Any and all spare pieces of wood and metal were pressed into service.  The yard at the back of the fish and chip shop was always good-pickings.  The wheels were more difficult to acquire, pram wheels of course were best, especially for the back as this gave the coveted dragster effect.  I once made a go-cart entirely out of old fish boxes and roller-skates, sad to say I ended up in a ditch when one of the roller-skates fell off while negotiating a particularly tricky bend.

The winter, of course, was very different when I was a boy, they were  much colder.  Crisp, nose-tingling days were a certainty as a precursor of what we hoped would be mountains of snow.  Then it came, small specks at first, then slightly bigger, until the sky was filled with a million large puffs of white delight.  Every boy and girl in those days worth their salt had a snow sledge or at least something to slide down the fields or banks on.  I sometimes used my Dad’s wooden surfboard or one of my Mum’s old tea-trays.

Life seemed to me much more fun because the games we played were all home-made.

© FCR Esgen