ColinJ,I read your circu,mavigation of Coventry blog and thought it was a good read. I also spent many a good time at Corley Rocks when i was a youngster.
Revisiting Corley Rocks reminded me how free I was as a child 45 or so years ago. My parents allowed me to have a bike when I promised to pass the Cycling Proficiency Test at school, which I duly did. Traffic was less of a problem then so my mates and I roamed about freely on our bikes to places such as Corley, several miles from the area we lived in.
My folks didn't know where I was most of the time, or even who I was with. We didn't have mobiles so they couldn't keep tabs on us the way that parents like to now.
We weren't chauffeured about everywhere. If we wanted to go somewhere we walked, ran, or cycled there, or maybe caught a bus.
As for paedophiles - we didn't use the word. 'Flashers' or 'dirty old men', we'd heard about but we weren't that worried about them - we just got on with having fun. Nothing bad ever happened to any of us.
It was a pretty simple, carefree life then with few of the pressures that modern kids have, struggling to stay on top of their huge social networks. I recently watched in horror as my teenage niece juggled two mobiles, a corded phone, email, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and Twitter. Messages flying back and forth every few seconds, and all of them pretty empty gossip. Lots of 'wicked', 'kewl', 'gross' and so on, and very little real communication at all. Nobody actually seemed to be doing anything significant, they were just trying to find out if anybody else was!
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