Long-forgotten Games

I was talking to my son's partner today about childhood. She was saying how Harleigh, her beautiful daughter and my beautiful granddaughter, will probably never play the games that she herself played as a child.

I asked her just what games she did play and they were all to do with computers! Now, I know that I'm from a different era, but surely all the childhood games from my childhood cannot have disappeared in just one generation?

Games like "British Bulldogs", 'Tin Can Squat", "conkers" and my favourite, "Outlanders". No doubt these games were played in different areas and different countries under different names.

British Bulldogs was where you all stood in a line on a field with just one person in the middle of the field. You had to reach the other side of the field without the person in the middle catching you! Some people played it where you only had to touch one of the runners to be caught, we played it where you had to wrestle them to the ground. I loved this game! I was very fast and very aggressive which made me quite good at it.

Tin Can Squat was where you found an old tin can and placed it in the middle of the street, and a group would go and hide, just like in hide and seek. The catcher would shut his eyes and count up to a pre-agreed number, then look for the kids that were hiding. When he/she saw one of the hiders they would run back to the can and place their foot on it, and shout out the name of the person that they had found and add "tin can squat!! The trick was to find all the hiders before one broke cover and ran and kicked the can. This would release all the people who had been caught to go back into hiding.

Outlanders was another hiding game but over a larger area. Two people had to find and tag the persons they caught; once tagged, they joined the search party. I once had twenty kids chasing me through gardens, fields and the estate in general without being tagged. It was like fox hunting where you where the fox, and I loved it!

There were lots of other games we played, some we made up ourselves, like "Dog Shot" - this was where you couldn't let the backside of my mate Mick's dog point directly at you: if it did, you were "Dog Shot", and out of the game. Poor Dusty the dog couldn't understand why all the kids in the neighbourhood ran from him!

It seems that games like these are regarded as too dangerous for our little darlings now. I used to spend many a happy hour up at the accident and emergency department of our local hospital during the summer months. I had more stitches than a cheap suit and more broken bones than a professional football player will see in a lifetime. But it didn't matter to us, it was just part of the risk you took.

We used to go "Hell Diving" - young boys have a knack for over-dramatic names. All it involved was going to the local quarry and jumping off the slag heaps of stone that were piled up. Whoever jumped the furthest won. I was quite tall and skinny, so athletic-type games suited me quite well. This is why I like them, I was good at them.

I'm no longer a child in body, though in mind is a different thing. My wife claims that I'm a ten year old boy trapped in a man's body, and the man's body is getting older!

But I still love anything that involves speed and an element of danger. I still teach martial arts and love to fight (not street brawling, but in a ring).

As human beings, our environment is becoming more and more sterile. We are removing the element of risk from our lives. This in some ways is good: I like to know that the food I eat is safe for human consumption, something that couldn't always be guaranteed when I was young.

But giving children the impression that everything in life is safe is not only giving a false impression but also removing something that the human psyche needs: danger. This is why more young men are getting involved with role playing computer games, they like the danger, but have been trained to remove any harm. And why we in the west have an obesity epidemic amongst our young.

I know there is more traffic on the roads today than when I was young, in fact in my neighbourhood you could play in the middle of the road most of the day with only one or two cars driving past. And I know that fields are disappearing and being turned into housing estates where shoebox houses clump together like fungi on a tree. And yes there is the risk of drugs, but in my day there bottles of "Woodpecker Cider", which was probably more damaging than the odd spliff. But it's no more dangerous out there than it was when I was a kid, there were men you had to avoid even back then. So let your kids play out and experience freedom and mild forms of danger. And maybe we won't have as many bored and disaffected young adults.

I'm trying to remember more games we played. Think back to your youth, and if you're going grey on the head and growing wider in the stomach, I bet it wasn't much different to my childhood?