Staying Out For The Summer

With the school holidays set to start soon, I can look forward to six weeks of relative quiet on the bus in the morning. It's the small things that make the work slog a bit more bearable and the relative peace is pleasant before I arrive at the office where I have to bite my tongue when Fifty Shades of poxy Grey is getting raved about.

Perhaps I should read it too, only the extracts I have seen suggest it was written by a 16 year old virgin whose knowledge of sex comes entirely from the letters sections of gentlemen's "rhythm" magazines. Although that's perhaps an insult to many young lads partaking in regular onanism, as I'm sure even that version of me could have made a better go of it. And seriously, you should see the stuff I wrote at 16 - I'd have beaten the Volgons in a bad poetry match anyday, and probably in a bad skin contest too.

Anyways. The prospect of an empty bus led me to think about the worst part of childhood. And it's not having to go to school, which obviously is pretty crap when you're going through it. It's also not having to grow up to see your skin go completely to cock and your voice having to be like Scooby Doo's for a little while.

No. The worst part isn't living through it, it's the hindsight. It's being on that bus at 7.30am on a workday, being thankful it's not full of screaming kids pissing about and then realising that they're probably all still in bed and will have the whole day to themselves. Which is followed by the thought "that was me once".

It's horrific. Whereas we used to have six weeks of summer to enjoy, now we didn't get that in a year. It's a depressing thought to think we won't get that kind of freedom unless we either come into some serious money or make it to retirement. It's easy in such moments to get misty-eyed of such times, out playing football for hours on end on the municipal pitch despite the council have removed the goalposts (why did they do that?) - I think that up to a certain age, maybe around nine or ten, you don't give much if any thought to the future. Perhaps two decades on, I'm idealising that time.

And it's that which brings the sucker punch, the knowledge that there's no going back. Real life, whether it comes aged 16, 18, 21, whatever, hits hard. I remember the first summer after I'd started doing "proper" jobs, looking out of the window into sunny climes, feeling wistful even if it did look out over Oldham.

What can you do? Well, you can be like me and think of those kids running around with their freedom with the thought "yeah, make the most of it, because one day soon you might end up like those poor sods I saw today, dressed like a pizza box standing on the pavement advertising special deals for a certain well-known takeaway franchise". Reality bites, kids.