I quite enjoyed growing up (other than the usual stuff) in my home town. I suppose in some ways we were lucky. Schools were indifferent and low pressure and weren't striving to tick boxes to get themselves higher up a league table. I seriously had no idea I was clever (oh quite snickering at the back, I got certificates, even if I probably can't find them*) until I was about fourteen when one of the few decent teachers (Ms - defiantly Ms – Taylor, biology) pointed out the possibility. I didn't actually believe her at the time but then I was a teenager and blessed with the inalienable nihilistic knowledge of all teenagers. My parents, as lacking in aspiration as most of my teachers, didn't care either. They couldn't to this day tell you what I went to university to study. I dunno, when I see friends torturing their kids into academia, it all seems so joyless. All that work so they'll likely get jobs they don't really like to pay for two cars and a mortgage.
We could bomb about all day on our BMXs without the risk of ASBOs or the letters to the newspaper. We didn't sit around indoors staring at a screen. Our moral panics were satanists (allegedly sacrificing babies in the cemetery) and video nasties. Turned out that there were no baby-sacrificing satanists and watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I Spit on Your Grave didn't turn you into a serial killer. Nor, for that matter, did home taping kill music.
No one got too fussed if you went to the pub aged 15. Occasionally the police would move us on, sometimes they gave us a lift to the next pub. There was the town's pub crawl, to be attempted once a year. All twenty-two pubs (I'm sure there's fewer now) which was a serious drinking and logistical challenge (back then they opened at 6.30 and closed at 11pm).
Of course, it was shit in some ways. Everyone was unemployed, the final pit closed in 1986 and much of the textile work had gone abroad. Everything was coloured with xenophobia, most people didn't go anywhere. We used to go down Nottingham once a year for Christmas shopping, which always seemed an epic trip, but was an entire seven miles. I recently cycled it on my Brompton in a not very many minutes and to much incredulity. My mum once took me a coach trip to that most exotic of destinations, the Birmingham Bull Ring Centre. A day trip to Skegness was serious business. You always took your own food on a trip, food from otherwhere couldn't and shouldn't be trusted.
Anyway, I contrarized this thread with totally believable stuff happening and it being quite dull. Sorry, no one got eaten by lions.
*Stuffed inside my PhD thesis. Where that is, on the other hand...
