But where do you GET this stuff from?

[lizwilliams]

A discussion elsewhere on suitable outings for children has made me start remembering some of the things I did as a child. I was brought up in a very ordinary household in Gloucester in the 70s: we didn't really have theme parks then and I don't think my parents would have gone near Disneyland. I first went abroad on a school trip when I was 10, to Lisieux, but we didn't have foreign holidays because we couldn't afford them, like many people in the UK at that point. We went to Wales a lot and it rained, a lot. We went to a great many castles and I was encouraged to run about on the battlements as long as I was careful.

My parents took me to see, among other things:

- a dead whale pickled in formaldehyde on the back of a low loader (some bloke had found this on a beach in Norfolk and with great enterprise, decided to take it round the country). I thought for years that I might have made this up, but it seems it was real.

- on board a minesweeper. I don't know where this was or why we went, but it was fascinating. I think my mother wanted me to see what kind of experiences my grandfather, a ship's engineer, might have had. It was oily and humming and slippery and grey.

I was regularly taken into pubs from an early age. Our local was a huge square building that used to belong to Baroness Orczy, of all people, and once the landlord let me into the cellars. That was fascinating, too, although it left me with a very odd memory of the actual size of the pub - I still can't quite reconcile the average-sized bar with the huge, cathedral-sized place it was to a child.

And I was allowed to read what I wanted, including my dad's large collection of Lobsang Rampa (remember him?), Hermetic magic and general occult fiction.

I don't know whether this has made me a hopeless lunatic or a fundamentally well adjusted person - those of you who know me will have to make your own minds up! I am not a parent, so can't possibly comment with any authority, but I think there are a lot of things from which children should be protected, and a lot from which they shouldn't. I suppose it depends on the child. I was a cautious, reserved kid and I'm still pretty cautious, especially when it comes to physical risk.

I still like Wales, and rain.

Comments

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

I share your experiences of an ordinary household and holidays in the rain in Wales. I do not share your experiences of dead whales, minesweepers or pubs. I feel cheated.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

If another dead whale shows up, we'll go together!

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

That's a date!

[pogodragon.livejournal.com]

I saw that whale, or maybe another one that someone else found and pickled, it came to Nottingham as well, it was on the Forest for a few days, the Forest which has no trees, but an annual Goose Fair.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Her mother and I decided very early on to not restrict the_child from risk taking. Our logic, quite literally, has been that if she falls out of a tree, we know where the hospital is. This doesn't mean we've licensed ourselves for gross stupidity, like playing in traffic, but it does mean we have a 10 year old with an excellent sense of her limits, and how expansive those limits are. (We also have a 10 year old who jumped off the roof of the clubhouse at a local park twice, to see what it felt like to land on grass, then concrete.)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, there was an article in the paper today about some educational establishment sponsored by Prince Charles, which encourages kids to take similar risks. The principal was quoted as saying that health and safety was all about risk assessment, not avoiding them altogether.

[ianmcdonald.livejournal.com]

this is tremendously rich vein you're tapping here. Small strange wonders on childhood holidays. My parents used to go to the Isle of Man (we flew, about twenty minutes from Belfast but it seemed positively transatlantic.) I remember being taken to the Witches' Mill in Castletown; an old windmill fileld with withcraft paraphernalia and odd little tableaux with stuffed cats and circles painted on the floor --thirtysomething years on I realise now it was Gerald Gardner's own collection. Thaks for giving me half an hour's pure and perfect pleasure in recollecting those instances of holiday weird.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! And a lot of that stuff is now in the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle. I'd have loved to have seen the original. Not sure how much of Gardner's stuff they've still got, as I think some of it was dispersed to other practitioners, but they've got a lot and probably some child is having a similar experience today (well, not today per se, as they're shut, but you know what I mean).

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Wales in the rain. Scotland in the rain. Cornwall in the rain. Do you start to see a theme, developing? :) Also no dead whales or minesweepers, but sailing, canoeing, fishing, winkling, walking coastal paths, climbing mountains, exploring abandoned mining villages and riding the Talyllyn railway. Oh yes, and castles to go with the ubiquitous pillboxes.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I never went sailing (though my mother did), but a beach isn't a beach unless it has rock pools. I once spent a day on a tropical beach in Cuba and got very bored after Hour 3. Then we found some things that looked like trilobites under a rock and all was well.

God knows how I'd fare in, say, Cannes. Better not go.

[sawyl.livejournal.com]

Rock pooling is definitely better than sailing. I used to do both, the former more enthusiastically than the latter, and while I struggle to remember a single nasty rock pool related moment, the three near-death sailing experiences remain shockingly vivid...

[coyotesequoia.livejournal.com]

With our two boys, we exercised our ability to offer advice to a far greater extent than our more limited ability to control and protect. I think it has worked out well.

As to whether you are a "hopeless lunatic or a fundamentally well adjusted person" ... I can say, with a certain level of approval, that I've seen signs of both. I would hope that you have a good dose of each.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

My friends seem to agree! :-)

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I remember running around in a pack with the neighborhood kids, doing things like exploring the haunted house (a partially burned abandoned house in the neighbor) or going on an impromptu walk through the mountains to find a rumored swing rope. My mother was a professor, so in the summer when she didn't work we went for long drives across the U.S. to visit relatives. My grandmother's farm had rattlesnakes and water moccasins living on it, and I once saw her blow up a snake with her double-barrelled shotgun.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Excellent grandmother!

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Lobsang Rampa! Now that opens up a drawerful of memories I haven't looked at in a long time. I read a great deal of occult material, some of it of questionable provenance, starting at a fairly young age - although I had to go looking for it, it wasn't in my mother's library.

Although she did let me read anything on her shelves, and as she was a clinical psychologist, that gave me access to some fairly strong stuff at an early age.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

LR was deeply dodgy. I think he was a bit like Grey Owl - i.e. not a Tibetan native at all, but an accountant from Cheam who had a rich inner life, which eventually took over. Interesting stuff when you're 13, though. I spent a lot of time practicing astral projection, which didn't work at the time (though I sometimes do it now and all that happens is that I wander about trying to turn off the lights. Either that or I'm having boring dreams).

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, though, to look back on all the things that originally interested me in the occult. These days, there are a great many of them that I shudder or chuckle at - yet they are what eventually led me to my current personal understanding of the spiritual. I suppose the key was realising that there was something very much worth searching for that lay behind some of the more clumsy attempts to communicate it.

I've actually had a couple of fairly strange yet personally fascinating astral projection-like experiences over the years, although I must admit that most were, er, enhanced by the consumption of various substances.

[manmela.livejournal.com]

No you are not making it up. I remember the whale in a trailer as well. I think I saw it at either Portsmouth or Littlehampton

Didn't do a mimesweeper but I seem to remember at a open day in Portsmouth when I went on board a moored submarine with my grandfather

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

It'd be interesting to do a poll on who saw the whale. Now, in my memory, it's like that scene in Dune where the pilot of the ship appears in its tank.

I can't for the life of me remember where the minesweeper was moored, but I think it might have been a place called Sharpness on the Bristol Channel.

[(Anonymous)]

I live for typos, and "MIMEsweeper" is simply a peach!

Thank you, kind sir, you have made my day.

And, coincidentally, kept the seas safe from the Silent Peril.

Esther

[manmela.livejournal.com]

Mimesweeper is an old email product, and I've spent the last week at work trying to rebuild our email infrastructure... so it's a Freudian slip...although I prefer your image

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

Having been born in a very landlocked area of Canada our summer holidays that included trips to the house in Nova Scotia always seemed to put me in a whole other category of person. Growing up many people I knew hadn't left the county, let alone the province.

We used to be set free and the parents would look out for us once a day, pretty much. Beaches were free range, and generally empty. We'd all walk in a ragged line (sometimes barely able to see each other in the distance) exploring the sand and stone and surf for hours. I remember it wasn't uncommon to go 3 hrs in one direction before stopping for lunch.

I was often left to my own devices. Hours and days spent alone in the woods and out in the middle of nowhere. I remember a LOT of time spent getting over the fear of leaving sight of the house and suddenly... one day... I realized I was in love with the spaces that felt completely my own. Those spots on the land that I would stop and wonder, who had walked here before. What had they done. What had they built and why. There were a lot of half ruins of older farms and odd mounds of stone obviously from torn down ... somethings.

I rocked climbed. I ran through woods with bear and wolves. And coyotes. I remember, actually, wandering along a cliff and suddenly realizing I was standing in the middle of a bunch of coyote dens. Some of which were occupied.

I'm a firm believer in building skills in children, not restricting them to safe experiences. Ultimately it seems to leave us with adults with no real coping skills and the real world is a right bitch about slow learners.