A Childhood Memory
We lived in a town called Halesowen, which is probably one of the furthest places from the sea in the UK, yet we had a yellow and blue inflatable dinghy that had been purchased one time when we went on holiday. Little did that dinghy know that it wasn’t destined for a seafaring life; oh no, it was destined for something altogether greater…
My sister is three and a half years younger than me, and I think we probably fought quite a bit growing up. But I don’t really remember many of those times; apart from the one occasion when, aged about five, she bit me on the bottom and lost a tooth - but I guess that’s a memory for another story! However, what I do remember is that we always had a lot of fun playing together. And the blue and yellow dinghy - despite our great distance from water - soon became a firm favorite.
It’s important to stress, it was a different time. A time before mobile phones, the internet, and social media and lots of other things that children these days have to fall back on in times of boredom. So we had to improvise.
So, we had a blue and yellow dinghy. We had no water. But what we did have was a very steep set of stairs and a complete lack of fear.
So my childhood memory is of my sister and I squeezing ourselves into the dinghy at the top of the stairs and then sliding at breakneck speed to the bottom (where our travel would be arrested instantly by a small table). The fact there was a huge glass door at the bottom of the stairs never really factored into our thinking. So it was also apparently a time before health and safety regulations…
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