I was sat outside the other day talking to an old friend I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, eventually we got around to some of the shit we used to get up to. We both decided that we must have had balls the size of melons when we were kids, to do the things we did.

Not far from where we lived was an old quarry that had filled with water, for some reason the water looked really blue, so, naturally, it was called the blue lagoon (not quite as nice as the film, skinny dipping in Hampshire in the middle of November is not a pastime id recommend!)

Anyway, back to the memory.

To get to the quarry you had to cross a motorway bridge, not a tall order you might say. Try it on top of the handrail, in the dark! The police tried everything they could think of to stop us doing it, in the end we stopped when a mate fell and died. No matter what the old bill told us, or showed us, it wasn’t until our mate actually died that we saw the danger.

Now-a-days if some kids did that on the bridge near me, the H.S.E would probably have it removed!

Rope swings over rivers were always great, having the rope snap was all part of the fun, a three foot fall into a river always got a giggle from the girls. So what if you spent a week nursing rope burn, a role in the hay never came so cheep!

Around here if the council find ropes near rivers they cut them down, kids and water don’t mix, apparently?

Where me and my mate grew up we had a backdrop to die for, the South Downs. They were got to by jumping over a neighbours fence and legging it through her garden (if you walked, her dog won!)  The woods were great fun; it got to the point where we knew every footpath in them, and never got lost.

If a kid goes to play in the woods now, the old bill send out rescue teams to find them.

We agreed on the next part as well, even though we slagged off everything about the cotton wool mentality of today’s society, as fathers, we are partly to blame. And we would die if our kids were like we used to be…wouldn’t we?