How I enjoy these enchanted evenings
RWe’d have kicked a football around in a field and we really did have jumpers for goalposts
EMEMBER the simple joy of playing out: those long spring and summer evenings that went on for ever, and were only brought to an end by the nagging feeling that you really should get home before it got proper dark?
That’s what these late April evenings are beginning to feel like, and there are nights I just don’t want to be indoors.
A lot of rubbish appears on social media about the way things were in the old days, when we all apparently used to be kicked out of the house at first light to spend the day cheating death in various 1960s and 1970s ways, eating mud and drinking pond water before trailing home late at night to the homes where our happy, smiling parents sat watching the Black and White Minstrels on a 405line TV set.
Most of this is pure hokum, and it’s written specifically to make the older generation feel smug and superior, and younger people feel guilty about not spending their spare time falling out of trees and drinking from ponds.
By all means let them stay indoors watching TV and playing on their PlayStations if that’s what they want to do, but it has to be said that there’s an irony about playing a football game on a screen in a darkened room when there are fields and footballs and jumpers for goalposts just outside.
It was a privilege to grow up on the edge of town, where there were lanes and paths and fields a few minutes away on the other side of the ring road. Much of it has gone now, but there are a few bits left, and I’m not going to tell you where they are in case you decide you want to build something on them. That’s where I was running the other evening when it occurred to me I really didn’t want to go home just yet, and shut out the splendour of the evening.
There were blackbirds in the hedgerows and pheasants in the fields, cattle roaring messages from one pasture to the next. An irate jay moved from tree to tree ahead of me, trying desperately to stay out of my way.
Bluebells are beginning to show up under the trees: just a suggestion of a misty carpet for now, ahead of the full revelation in a week or two when you can’t move for the things, leaping out at you in a ‘Ta-da! Here we are!’ kind of way.
The aroma of wild garlic is beginning to cling around the muddy paths through the woods.
I wouldn’t have cared about any of these things when I was growing up, but it was enough that lanes and trails were there so we could walk and cycle up and down, exploring and talking nonsense until goodness knows what time, when our body clocks told us it was time to go home.
We’d have kicked a football around in a field which is now all houses, and of course we really did have jumpers for goalposts. We’d have slid down, then clambered up, the walls of the old quarry where we had been forbidden to go.
The other night I was enjoying my run so much that when I reached the top of Long Road after a long and arduous climb I turned right for Waddeton instead of left for Paignton, and did another big loop of countryside before deciding to head back again. These are the long evenings that just cry out to be used, to be filled with walks and runs and games of football.
I want to play out, and I’m not coming home until it gets proper dark.