Now the thing about getting old is that there seems to be heaps more time for the memories of the past to invade the doings of a busy day.
Shallow ponds and lazy streams, 2018 |
I say that, but much of what our sons did when they were younger are only now being revealed as in their own bouts of nostalgia, they share stories of daring dos which they wouldn’t dare to have admitted to when they were 10.
Some of those stories do resonate. Their adventures on the meadows on long summer days, chime in with my own, when armed with just a warm bottle of lemonade and a day stretching ahead of us, we wandered off in search of adventures in some faraway park, or along a stretch of the Thames.
Often it was at the end of a train journey or the limit of a Red Rover bus pass, and it usually involved a quiet suburban spot, unhindered by other people.
One such place was at the end of a railway line, and rather than explore we just sat on the platform.
There were no trains, no passengers and the only sound was that of a lazy insect collecting pollen, mixed with that distinctive smell of mown grass, which competed with the equally powerful smell of the oil-soaked wooden railway sleepers cooking in the sun.
We must have sat there for hours before boredom and the empty bottle of lemonade prompted us to move on.
The spot where we played with the hot street tar in 1958 |
Today the street surface doesn’t melt, and the lolly sticks are no longer there in abundance.
And in the same way those Clean Air Acts of the 1960s have happily done away with the heaps of polluted air which in turn gave us the smog’s which meant we got sent home early from school making our way along roads devoid of landmarks.
Nor today are there those thick sooty deposits on trees which when you climbed them left your hands and clothes grubby and grimy.
But enough of such nostalgic tosh.
Smog's and fogs, 1953 |
These they can leave to their imagination fed by granddad’s tales of aimless adventures on long ago summer holidays in that place called the 1950s.
I might try and pretend this is all about the historical context, but perhaps it is just a nostalgic wallow.
Location; nostalgia land
Pictures; Shallow ponds and lazy streams, 2018 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the spot where me and Jimmy O' Donnel played in with the hot street tar in 1958, from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick, 2015, and Nelson’s Column during the Great Smog of 1952, N T Stobbs, licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
I love that nostalgic tosh and can remember going around London with my red rover ticket and at 13 knew London like the back of my hand. For me, smelling the creosote on telegraph poles and going home on the bus with blackberry stained clothes are just a couple of the things I remember from those days.
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