Good Place for a Camp, My Childhood.

Every now and then, its inevitable to frequent a article stating if you can related to half of the content you know you're a 90’s kid etc. Well in honesty i relate to a few items but never the entire thing, maybe that means my childhood was incredibly rare and the stuff me and my friends got up too is complete freakish and alien compared to the rest of our generation. Lets find out shall we as i delve into my own little version of ‘You know you had a similar childhood thing as me, if these things happened to you also in some way or other, during the 90s and 00’s and all that.’ High warning some of these maybe incredibly Irish. 

Everywhere was a ideal location for a Camp

Me and my friends where obsessed with the ideal of creating the dream camp. Walking along a alley way, through a ditch, dirty back end gardens cornered off for being a little bit dangerous, one of us would turn to the other and go ‘ this would be the ideal location of a camp'. This would draw up the wondrous images of basically a little house we could all hang out in, even if it was raining. In reality, we would dig a hole near it, collect sticks, and not much else would change. I said we were obsessed not any good at making camps.  The whole idea was so we had a place to go when it rained because no kid wants to go home.

Climbing Everything and Anything

You could not keep me out of a tree. I would climb the walls, trees, houses, anything i could get my hands on. That was until there was a local meeting about kids failing from said climbing and they poured some oil on the usual haunts of our climbing adventures. That was particularly mean.

Lets Make a Swing

The ultimate goal of all the climbing and looking through ditches was to find the ideal strong branch, and find a supply of rope to make the perfect swing. God when a swing got made, it would draw all the kids locally together to play on it for hours. There was one particularly good one, made from a old huge tree where by a older kid had tied the rope to a brand so high when you where on the swing, it used to go all the way down the slope the tree was on and fling you over the main road below it. Not at all dangerous. It was the best swing, until someone fell off it on the main road. I wont name, names. Amy.

Berry Wars

When we weren’t making swings or climbing trees. We were collecting the elusive berry’s to have a berry war.  All this was in reality was a lot of kids using the opportunity to take out there anger on other kids by flinging these hard red stone like Berry’s into each others faces. Those things were sore and caused serious damage. Luckily after flinging them you could turn and shout ‘Berry war’ and get away scot free. 

Cafes and Shops

Not going to lie me and my gang where little entrepreneurs and would set a up a little cafe and charge extortionate amounts of money for watery hot chocolate and cold nescafe instant coffee. Luckily the adults were humouring us, but little did they know we were making proper amounts of cheddar and spending it all on sweets for ourselves Those idiots. 

Jumble Sales and Toy Shops

To be honest we would all collect our toys on the guise of a jumble sale in reality we just wanted to line up our toys in public marvel at what we had collected ( from McDonalds the majority of this crap was) and get annoyed if someone moved it out of where we had carefully placed it.  If anyone asked it was a toy shop or jumble sale. 

Knock Knock

Playing knock knock run away.  Getting caught playing knock knock run away. Getting into serious trouble for playing knock knock run away. Do not know what we were thinking, the houses in our little estate were so close together it was impossible to get a clear distance away before they door was answered.

Strangers Gardens

Climbing into strangers gardens. I do not know why we enjoyed this, more for the chance to explore the unknown. The problem here is if we didn’t get caught straight away we would claim the place as our own and visit it often which ultimately ended up in getting caught and then in trouble again. 

Crossing of Roads

One thing that wasn’t allowed. Crossing the main road to enter other housing areas. But we did it all the time. Which was fine unless you got caught. Which we rarely did, unless some parent happened to be driving along the road at the time. How could we not? There were ditches to play in, and more importantly there were hand rails to dangerously hang off. 

Butcher 

Anyone else remember that game? Basically one person would stand in the middle while the rest of us would be at one side and when the person in the middle called butcher, race across the road to the other side. the person in the middle would try and prevent you crossing over by simply beating the shit out of you if they could grab you. Of course you can get out of this by saying butcher and you join your friend in the free pass at kicking the shit out of your friends game. Oh the wonders of childhood. 

Water Fights

Summer time anyone. Water fights where the one and only way to calm down. they all start harmlessly enough. But then somewhere along the line, a little water being sprayed in your face turned into you pulling someones hair while you simultaneously shove a full  car wash power hose in there month yelling WATER FIGHT while they struggled to breath.  Yeah water fights. If the fight didn’t turn vicious then someone always fell and cut there knee really bad. 

Sunday Trips

I remember being furious that my lovely parents had the audacity to take me away for the day on sundays to beach towns for dinner and lovely walks. How dare they. did they not want me to watch tv all day? I would have to pretend to be odd in the car for the entire journey. 

Calling for People

remember the days where you would actually knock on a door without knowing if the person was there and ask them to come out and play? such a alien concept as your grow older. We would go one step up. If new neighbours moved in, we would immediately call to that door to see if we could claim a new friend to our little group. They never had kids.  Or they did and the kids didn’t want to hang with us.

Going to the Shop

We used to love going to the shop. Obviously cause this ended up in getting sweets. We would arrange it for ages. Me and my friends were kind enough to ask the local elderly if they needed anything in the shop we liked it that much. What we loved more then going to the local shop. Going to a shop even further away, down the hill, or up the hills. Other shops equals different range of sweets. How could you not be tempted? 

Quick Fire Round

Playing Rounders with every kid off all ages in your area. Catching the ball first try with both hands means you automatically win. yes my friend. yes.

Collected Pogs shamelessly without fulling understanding how to play it. I still don't know. all i know is i had some fabulous ones i had gotten from my Aunt Dymphna from Brussels that were gigantic and no one else had. 

Collecting lyrics from the back of Smash hits magazine. Also collecting the crappy free CD’s that had complete waste of time songs. Or if they did have a good song, it was a remix that made it impossible to enjoy. Still it always bulked up my CD collection at the time. 

Swapping pokemon characters with gigantic leads that went from your game boy to your friends.  Fooling your friend into thinking you were swapping a good one, when in fact your were off loading a crappy one for there fully trained one. 

Playing crash bandicoot for hours. Not having enough space on your playstation memory card because your older brother used to have it all used up,  to save your progress. Having to just leave it on. Coming back and it was frozen and you had to restart it and start at the start. Now that was pain my friends. 

Drawing complete circle coloured drawings on your first computer ( mine was a macintosh 95) and then using all of the incredibly expensive ink in the printer to print them off to hang on your wall. I was a cool kid i was. 

Getting the same computer to speak the dirty words your typed in. Macs where amazing machines even back then. 

Someone bringing there personal CD player outside and everyone else bringing there CDs to listen to the tracks. Listening to 5’s first album because everyone you know has a copy of it and listen to the secret track (55) which you had to manually go all the way up to have a listen to it.  Was it Mr Gadget? Or was that from there second album? The embarrassing history of my music taste as a kid. 

Making mixed tapes for hours, staining by your radio waiting for the song you requested to come on, hoping the DJ will shut the feck up so you do not have his voice at the start or end of it. Always realising there cut the end of the song off too early the feckers. 

Peeing outside. Would like to say this was just a boy thing, but you know it was totally the girls too. I don’t know what the obsession was here but no one wanted to go home to there perfectly good bathroom but instead piss in a bush cause that was the clean thing to do. I think we were all such double crossing little shits we all were secretly afraid to go home in case we came back and were the target for someone unknown new hatred.  Kids used to have a it ruff. 

watching top 30 hits on RTE for the 30 second clip of each song. More importantly you can see a top ten of the dance songs your pretending to like. That never seemed to have proper music videos but more colour montages with the name of the song.  Then calling into the competition at the end many times in a row to win the top 30 hits on CD. Did anyone ever win this? I would really like to know.

sneaking into films that were for the age 12 when you were 11. because your are that cool.  Not handling the pressure of pretending your age and thus all your friends don’t get into the film when they are actually 12. having to settle for another movie in the other cinema that is for 12’s but is a boring romantic called message in a bottle. ( Still sorry about that one guys).

going to the local park at a age that was a seen as a bit too old for it. Playing on the giant tire swing, with a group of complete strangers having the best time of my life. Walking by the pond where the rumour was some kid had drowned. Im sure that rumour is in everyone local park in the world. 

 (Exclusively Cork) Running across the shaky bridge trying to shake it, only to find its been broken years and now only shudders dangerously on windy days which i discovered on the way to college one day to my near death experience. 

As you become a teenager the stuff you do becomes more in home and ultimately it seems more boring. 

Staying up until 2 am watching TV on friday and saturday nights just cause you can. 

sleeping into 1 our 2 in the afternoon because you are so tired from being up all night. 

Arranging to go to town with all your friends. Not being able to agree on a time. Finally heading off mid afternoon circling the town and ending up in McDonalds ordering Fries with all the free dips.

Spending hours on the phone to friends that you can literally see there house from your window. in-fact often you would go on the phone so would they and you would both look at each other from the window. 

hanging around the streets until it was dark playing spin the bottle and dares. Both games full of hidden agendas of who fancies who or if you me, who’s hiding what sexual preference. 

changing your musical taste to be exclusively rap and dance because your just that white. 

drawing random rap artists tags on your copy books to gain respect from peers. 

smoking papers because thats the same as actual smoking and looks just as cool. 

wearing tracksuits all day long, cause isn’t thats what in fashion right now?

texting when texting cost credit. Using the text short language to save on space. 

Playing snake on your cool Nokia 3210. Getting above 1000 in score cause you were just that cool.

Sending MMS pictures of Eminem around. Why? I do not know but you could save them to your outbox people. 

Downloading sheets to completely code to create ringtones for your phone. Who needs to pay when you can do it yourself.  you enter in the letters and the speed and it results in the coca cola theme tune. Bliss, now when my phone rings everyone thinks I'm cool.

Remembering when the first picture phones came out. Knowing for a fact non of use used to take photos of ourselves on these phones at all but send photos of posters in our rooms or the television to each other.  Also remember the dirty GIFs that started to go around when these phones truly hit the teen scene. 

This and a lot more make up my childhood memories however, these are the things that stick out the most and cause a right laugh when me and my childhood friends ( Still got two of them, Sinead and Amy) catch up for drinks and reminisce about the good old times.