Childhood Memories: Riding our Bikes

When I was growing up we did not have smartphones and the only games console I had was a Sega Megadrive and I thought that was the greatest thing EVER!!! How wrong was I?

In the hot summer’s days and the long summer holiday we had to find ways of entertaining ourselves without the use of social media, internet or girls. I think even back then I scared them and I’m pretty sure that hasn’t changed.

Growing up I had a few close friends but none closer than Ben, we were without doubt best friends, walking to school every morning, staying round each other’s houses, football you name it we seemed to be inseparable and during the holidays this too didn’t change.

Very rarely did my family go away as we just couldn’t afford it so seven weeks in the summer seemed like a life time and I’m sure to my family it did too. There was only so much football I could play before even that got bored but we had another little hobby and that was riding our bikes.

When I was about 14 – 15 years old one of our favourite things to do was fill up our water bottles and just ride, we would actually ride for hours without a clue where we were going, like I said this was before we had mobile phones so if anything happened no one would know but back then no one seemed to worry about these things. At times we would cycle for miles and miles and be nowhere near home yet somehow we always found our way back before dinner.

Times have changed so much…have people changed that much? I’m pretty sure the dangers still lurked around every corner but I guess it wasn’t documented so much. We had no phones, no money,  we didn’t even wear helmets, no one seemed to wear them and this was only 15 – 16 years ago.

The thought of even allowing the girls to play out on the front green at that age scares me, at one point we grabbed a map to see if we could work out roughly how far we went from home and the furthest was 15 miles away, pretty good going without getting lost I’d say.

Darren Coleshill: onedad3girls.com