To celebrate the launch of Divine Magazine’s new author service Divine Promotions, we are excited to present Summer Blog Hop 2016! Join us for this fun giveaway blog hop July 25-August 8.
WELCOME TO DIVINE’S SUMMER BLOG HOP 2016
Get hopping and read all the post as the common theme is Summer 😎☀️
Now That’s What I Call Summer...a memory of childhood in Yorkshire.
In the summertime, everything is fine
But even more so, every thing is long and slow.
The six week summer holidays are sooo long and slowww that it is necessary to invent things that wouldn’t otherwise exist, in order to fill up the time.
One year we overheard some people talking about “having a gymkhana”.
That sounded like a good idea, so we decided to arrange one too.
Just as soon as we’d found out what a gymkhana actually was.
Maybe we should ask Mrs.Nextdoor?
Mrs. Nextdoor didn’t know, but she thought it was something they had down south. Or maybe out in the country. But anyway, why not go on a nature trail instead down the local brook?
Mr.Overtheroad was washing his already gleaming Ford Anglia. We decided he might know. After he’d finished cursing his inability to remember to check the windows were all shut before turning the hose on, he taught us three new swear words. But nothing about gymkhanas. We decided to take his advice and move our bikes off his lawn before he ‘showed us the back of his hand’. Which we already knew would be wet and soapy, and attached to a right pillock.
At the local library, we learned that a Brimstone is a type of butterfly, that going by their paintings, the local Sunday School seven and eight-year-olds have some very strange looking parents, and that on the off chance someone has already written a book about Eddie Gray, then it must be out on loan. But we drew a complete blank on books about gymkhanas.
Outside, after buying screwballs and 99s from Antonio’s Ice Creams (the fella was so well known to us though, that he happily let slip he was really just plain old Tony from Cudworth - albeit the Italian end of Cudworth, so he reckoned), we found a half-inflated casey that had been run over by a car, and played that game you do with knackered old footballs when no matter how far you try and kick it, you’re lucky if it ends up more than 15 yards away. I imagine it ended with the bowl-shaped decrepit piece of leather being used as a pudding-basin hat by all of us in turn, while we were on the way to our next port of call.
Spider John was two years above us at school, which at that age seemed like a whole generation gap.
Usually he was tinkering with dismantled bike parts. Today he was concocting a deluxe home-made skateboard, by gluing the wheels off some old roller skates onto a plank of wood his dad had let him have in exchange for tidying out the garden shed. When it was finished, it could just about fit the four of us on it at once - but try as we might, we never once made it down to the bottom of the hill without at least one (and usually all) of us falling off. We had such a laugh though, that we forgot to ask him if he knew what a gymkhana was and if he wanted to help us organise one, and by the time we’d remembered, we were sat outside the fish shop - most probably lobbing vinegar-soaked chip ends at passing pigeons, or else waiting for your lass and her mates to come by.
Back in them days, you could rely on parks to be both empty and safe of an evening, so we had a whole world of entertainment at our disposal - providing that grass, two old swings, and a really weird type of wooden roundabout was all you wanted as a backdrop.
Then as it started getting dark, it was always a race to get home before it got totally pitch black, at which point either your mam would ring my mam, or vice versa before the ‘dad search party’ was sent out to track us down.
Though the years all tend to blur into one nowadays, I can safely date those memories, as I distinctly remember the three of us together through all of the above. It was the last summer we were all together, before Jammo had his accident. Then after that, it was just the two of us for a while, and things were never quite the same again. It’s funny how tragedy crystallises the mind.
Looking back now, it’s amazing how the summer holidays used to fly by. No wonder we never found time to work out what a b@#$tard gymkhana was.
T.Wotsit, July 2016
GRAND PRIZE GIVEAWAY
18K Gold Filled Crystal Pearls Heart Party Dress Jewelry Set
Divine Promotions – 10 Days Promo Tour
Divine Promotions – 2 Day Release Blitz
$75 credit from Dreamspinner Press
$30 credit from Dreamspinner Press
Below you will find all the Blogs taking part
Divine Magazine & Divine Promotions presents Summer Blog Hop 2016! Join us for this fun giveaway blog hop July 25-August 8!
Thanks for your participation in Divine's Summer Blog Hop 2016
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