Challenging ideas

Can past ideas around boyhood presentation and roles be an inspiration where today's seem so tame and lacking any meaningful kind of challenge and adventure with a big bundle of cotton wool to wrap around you as much as you feel that urge?

Just what is so wrong with idea we might learn to do things that call for attention to detail and self discipline and maybe have a role with some responsibilities?

This boy would of loved to had been dressed up in short short trousered sailor suit rather like these members of a Soviet era youth organization, looking very smart rather than the messy casuals I had (and don't mention the beeping jeans!).

That was more my idea of being a boy not a pint sized carbon copy of Dad.

A note from the dorm, 77 style

Imagine instead of it being 2016, it was actually 1977 where we'd made major technological breakthrough where instead of being sat typewriting a letter leaving a space for illustrations, we'd actually got the internet?

Well, one thing I'd of been writing about from our dorm is my comics because back in 1977 our newsagents had a few shelves full of them for boys and girls of all ages, not mini magazines or tat infested fim, toy and footie tie-ins.

Comics that had stories existing in a self contained world we'd all drift into.

I remember Tiger from Juniors but the one I really got into big time was the War Comic, Warlord that launched in September 1974, to the point my parents went all over Nantwich, Cheshire to get me some back issues I was missing.

It fitted in well with my mania for Action Man.

Roy of the Rovers was a boyhood institution that gave rise to popular phrases, the inspirational footie figure who combined ball control with the kind of emotional control to be a mature player on and off the pitch.

It also had features on the actual game although strangely enough then there were weekly footie magazines for boys our age 10-14 like Score! 

Comics reflected life as we lived it, to the boy of today it may seem another land with different rules and expectations.

The grown ups were our enemy, we'd always be trying to get out of things, playing tricks on them, forever pushing the boundaries but our luck would run out and soon enough our bottoms were made to pay the price.

That's the thing you notice when you re-read a good number of the comics and their annuals today, you were always shown cheek, bullying, lying and damaging other peoples stuff would be punished and adults wherever we were did with immunity.

Summer and me

Summer after the Whit Holiday was always something to look forward to as after six weeks of lessons, end of term tests and all that we had the Hols, six solid weeks away from school and all its boring rules and petty swabbles between classmates except for the fact after two weeks "we woz bored"!

Sometimes the period tied in with key events such as sorting your subjects to study at the end of the third year for GCE's (or C.S.E's) for the next two years and the examinations or moving up to anothe rpart of school like the last term in Infants or the Fifth Form where come september you'd be in sixth and treated more as a young adult.

Summer term in 1974 was big with me as we'd just moved to a new school building with lots of new things we could now do but we'd only have a whole school year before we'd make our own ways to differing secondary schools.

Also being a year older I was finding I was getting more out of popular singles of the time as I understood more about what the songs were so my tastes were getting a little more sophesticated and an example of that was "Jarrow Song" by Alan Price which was about the march protesting being out of work  and One Man Band by Leo Sayer.