Flashback

I may have said it before but having a kid gives you flashbacks. Childhood memories long forgotten or repressed come back when you do childhood things.

The other day I am with my daughter at the swing park behind our house, she is running around, attempting to defy the laws of physics by sliding up the slide and generally causing her own brand of harmless mayhem. I am merely there making sure she doesn’t fall down or hurt herself.

It’s then that I notice I am standing on a small hole in the ground where the pole that grounded the middle of the roundabout used to be. The roundabout is long gone and the hole is filled with rainwater now. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice is reminding me that roundabouts are dangerous and have probably been banned by our governmental overlords.

It’s then that a memory comes flooding back to me.

I see myself , probably between the ages of 7 and 14, playing this game: You would lie down on your belly, securing your feet to something on the roundabout whilst your friends spun you as fast as they could. Another friend would then crush a coke can (or with it being in Scotland, more than likely it was an Irn Bru can) from the top down so that it looked like an ice-hockey puck. He would then kick this can underneath the fast spinning roundabout and you would have to try to reach under and grab it.

It was incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid and the best kind of fun. Something that only a kid who believes he/she is indestructible could appreciate (don’t all kids think they are indestructible?).

There are three possible outcomes to this game: you could retrieve the can, you could lose an arm under there or you could fly off through the air like a clay pigeon and sandpaper your nose and chin along the ground.

Just to make it more interesting, I will also point out that in playgrounds in the town where I grew up, the roundabouts were made from rusted steel with (often) rotted wood bases. They were also almost inevitably covered in broken glass from the previous nights drunken teenage shenanigans, especially underneath where that golden prize awaited.

All the ingredients you need to make a really good trip to the hospital.

It’s fucking mad that more people weren’t killed or maimed. Then again, maybe they were and that is why the roundabout disappeared.

By the way I tried to find a good photo of a Scottish roundabout online and the best I could do was a Soviet one which I guess says more about the upkeep of the playgrounds in my hometown than I'd care to admit but here ya go: