CHILDREN'S PARTIES

Last night we began the final preparation for our next Street Party, which, whether you are a Royalist or not is purely and simply a celebration of community, a shared desire in our avenue of life in which we live to just down tools, eat food in the middle of the road, let our children run like packs of tiny sun-kissed feral dogs in and out of each other’s houses and to have some fun with pointless and joy-filled games ranging from ‘dress your pet as a historical villain’, ‘men dressed as Queens’,  ‘egg and spoon’, ‘welly chucking’, ‘Dads on Kids' bike race’…. the list goes on. Sending our two out on a letter posting relay race up and down the road and seeing the smiles and looks of excitement on both adults and children’s faces as they realise it is just around the corner was the start of a small bus trip down memory lane. The lane is called Childhood Memories of the late 70s and early 80s with the next stop this time being A Child’s View of a Party that involves Adults.

A little something before I carry on. To my mother, who is only just really turning the corner on her recovery from some major and unpleasant surgery and is quite literally on the first days of a new beginning, what you are about to read is written purely with affection and fondness (also a small amount of bemusement). There will be the odd thing that you think, ‘my goodness, we didn’t do that did we?’ But those were innocent times. The same times when it was acceptable that a child was kicked out of the house on a Saturday morning, knowing he would forage for food at lunchtime and re-appear in time to watch Metal Mickey or the Fraggles and have one of your excellent Saturday teas. Rest easy, I and millions of adults my age are still alive and unmolested. The fact we don’t offer the same freedoms to our own kids reflects only on our neurosis.

Scotland – the early years

Like trying to watch Sapphire and Steel on an old black and white, dial-tuner TV, the early years are an idealised romantic haze of the glory we chose to remember over the harsh crackle of reality. The Silver Jubilee, Torrance 1977. I would have been 4. And yet what freedom I had as 4 year old. This freedom was brought about by having an older sister and living on a new build estate outside Glasgow where a community looks out for its younglings. Dressed as something, possibly a burglar, or a cat – or a cat burglar – I remember a short stint in tartan – I also remember some pretty tight denim shorts, a lot of roll-necks and a proliferation of horizontal stripe tops – maybe I wore them all on the day. I was quite an affected young thing even back then. Abiding memories, as soon as the adults had paraded us in the fancy dress competition, we scarpered, setting up camp on the wreckage of bricks, breeze blocks and cement that was waiting to be assembled into the rest of the estate. It was, I believe, on this day that I lost my sandals to a pile of cement that one of the older kids had been pouring water on. I think I may have been told off about this. We all drank fizzy coloured pop from glass bottles in the sun. We didn’t break a single one, mainly because the Fizzy Pop Truck would give us 10p if we returned all our bottles on collection day.

Torrance, like when I was little.
That shop next to the Esso garage used to sell stuff.

There were other party days, The Highland games where we all trooped to some place in the Highlands to watch men in kilts chuck heavy things around a field, the smell of cooking meat in the air hanging with the sound of ABBA on the PA system, kagools furled and packed into their own little bum bags always at the ready. Not just for the rain you understand. You get down on the side of a loch in the summer and Scotia’s very own species of piranha attack you. The midge can only be held at bay by a child sweating unnaturally in hooded kagool.  Scotland was a great place to grow up. There was always something to do, and it was always fun. Except from the times that weren’t, they usually resulted in a trip to Stobhill Hospital.

South East London – the early years

There were a couple of years of accent related isolation when we moved to London. This aside, the parties got stranger. There was a period of time when we went to a lot of Round Table events. I lament the passing of the popularity of the Round Table. I have no idea who or what they are/were, but they did parties that involved discos for kids on caravan sites. What is more fun for a child than a buffet, and sliding on your knees through a group of crinoline wearing adults dancing to Bucks Fizz? Then giddy with that speed-like rush of excitement and fear as you and 30 other kids laugh scream and chase each other round a campsite for no good reason other than you could. Today we would round up children enjoying themselves, slap ASBOS on them and return them to parents threatening them with jail terms for allowing their child to socially interact with two or more other children in a public place.

Soon came the age when you were no longer the young child who had to accompany your parents and be allowed the freedom of a party designed to accommodate the wee ones, but the slightly older one that was banished upstairs with your sibling and forced to sit in a bedroom with the kids of your parents friends who, to be perfectly honest, were not your friends. The only upside to these ‘dos’ is that invariably the ‘other’ kids had toys you didn’t. Turning society up-side-down, all around the country were kids being very polite to each other, making small talk with other kids, not making faux-pas or rocking any boats and discussing their favourite films whilst in contrast, downstairs are rooms filled with our fathers looking like Keith Lemon (always one or two of them wearing fake plastic boobs – why? I will never know) and our mothers rocking every kind of maxi-dress ever created. These were good times. These were the times when we had to sneak down to steal food and drink and smuggle it back up to the room. In retrospect, we probably didn’t have to creep. We were probably free to go and get what we wanted, we probably didn’t have to stay in the room either. Like disapproving 10 year olds we had created our child-based apartheid and put ourselves on the sharp end of it. But do you know what? These were fun times. We played on Commodore 64s (I am middle-class after all), we actually just kicked back and had a laugh with these strangers with one eye on the clock watching the hands tick ever closer to teen awkwardness but still firmly holding the hand of childhood simplicity.

Heady days. This is what we had to do to print something, kids today have it easy:
> PRINT ?W% : REM PRINT the byte pointed TO by W%; equivalent of 'PRINT PEEK(W%)'

South East London – the teen years

Now this is painful. A teenager, too young to be trusted alone, too old to see what possible joy could be gleamed from a party involving parents, add to that the gender split, it is a recipe for shit parties. In my experience, just to torment you further, your parents would ensure that somehow you were sat next to an elderly relative. Something that you didn’t appreciate back then, but now I know they were the most fun kids in the room, all correctness out of the window you could actually have a great time with them as they told you what they really thought of all the others around you. The other aspect of being the teen at a gathering is that you become the unpaid babysitter. Sure – you expect it with kids you are related to – but then come the little bastards that you aren’t related to. They are the ones who grab hold of an older child’s modelling knife and slice through his guitar strings or cut their hands to ribbons with it, or draw on a painting or wall, smash glasses and punch the other youngsters. You, as the teen, are responsible, but they, as Rosemary’s baby, couldn’t give a flying bowl of rice with peas about your failed authority. This is when parties ceased to be fun.

If this wasn't at your 80s party - you weren't going to
 the right parties.

South East London - The late teen years

As if I am going to put anything in this blog about those years. Mum, the house was always cleaned, the dog was never harmed.

Thank God my parents didn't own anything
that need a french polisher.

Essex – the now years

Our two little ones love a party so much it bursts our hearts. We know they will have the best time ever during our street party. Playing with friends, grazing from a buffet and eventually flaking out. We are so lucky that all our friends have the loveliest children who all look out for each other from the serious and responsible mid teen to cheeky and thinks she is older than she really is four year old. They will hopefully have the best memories and not realise that we curtailed their freedom to roam so much in comparison to our childhood that they essentially exist in a permanent curfew.

So much fun.

We will be entering our two hamsters into the pets as villains competition dressed as Hitler and Mussolini.