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It's a wet and windy Autumn day outside, as the rain runs down my window and leaves swirl past as if they need to be somewhere in a hurry. I almost feel like I should be preparing to brave the elements whilst getting ready for school, so evocative is it of days of long ago when such weather was something to be enjoyed (if you were ten years old) rather than cower from like a big feartie.
I can smell that 'woody' tang in the air, with hints of fireworks and Hallowe'en, and find myself wondering why, when I was younger, All Hallow's Eve and Guy Fawkes' Night seemed separated by a period of several weeks instead of the actual five days that exist between them. I can remember, in school, as the night of October 31st approached, the afternoon being given over to making masks for the big event to come. Then it would all happen again for November 5th, and I defy anyone to cast their minds back without seeming to 'remember' these two celebrations as being separated by a far longer period of time than they actually were.
I've often wondered how such a thing can be so. If October 31st fell on a Monday, mask-making day would have been on Friday the 28th. That means Guy Fawkes Night would have been on the following Saturday, and mask-making day would have occurred on Friday the 4th - a whole week later with a Saturday and Sunday in between. Well, weekends obviously seemed far longer to us as kids back then than they do now, but not all mask-making afternoons were partitioned by a full weekend, so the seemingly elongated interval between the two events is not fully accounted for by such an explanation.
We'll just have to put it down to that same mysterious phenomenon which makes all our yesterdays, in retrospect, seem better, brighter and longer than they really were. Don't we all feel that the summers of our childhoods were gloriously sunny for months on end, and that every Christmas morn we woke to find a deep carpet of snow spread before us outside our bedroom windows?
I doubt I'm alone in preferring to recall some things as they seemed to be, as opposed to how they actually were. ("I think, therefore it was" - as someone surely must have said.)
I can smell that 'woody' tang in the air, with hints of fireworks and Hallowe'en, and find myself wondering why, when I was younger, All Hallow's Eve and Guy Fawkes' Night seemed separated by a period of several weeks instead of the actual five days that exist between them. I can remember, in school, as the night of October 31st approached, the afternoon being given over to making masks for the big event to come. Then it would all happen again for November 5th, and I defy anyone to cast their minds back without seeming to 'remember' these two celebrations as being separated by a far longer period of time than they actually were.
I've often wondered how such a thing can be so. If October 31st fell on a Monday, mask-making day would have been on Friday the 28th. That means Guy Fawkes Night would have been on the following Saturday, and mask-making day would have occurred on Friday the 4th - a whole week later with a Saturday and Sunday in between. Well, weekends obviously seemed far longer to us as kids back then than they do now, but not all mask-making afternoons were partitioned by a full weekend, so the seemingly elongated interval between the two events is not fully accounted for by such an explanation.
We'll just have to put it down to that same mysterious phenomenon which makes all our yesterdays, in retrospect, seem better, brighter and longer than they really were. Don't we all feel that the summers of our childhoods were gloriously sunny for months on end, and that every Christmas morn we woke to find a deep carpet of snow spread before us outside our bedroom windows?
I doubt I'm alone in preferring to recall some things as they seemed to be, as opposed to how they actually were. ("I think, therefore it was" - as someone surely must have said.)
5 comments:
Childhood memories of holidays certainly do seem like a long time ago.
And of a far longer duration too. We used to get 8 weeks school holidays in Summer, and it seemed to last forever - 'til about a week or so before they ended. Then it went by too fast.
My earliest memories of British comics are The Topper, TV21, TV Tornado, Pow, Smash and Fantastic. When I was about 6 or 7 I had a papershop order for Whizzer and Chips and Cor! and later, Shiver & Shake.
My cousin got Valiant and Lion and other kids had the Beezer, the Dandy and the Beano. I was never crazy about anything from the DC Thomson stable other than the Topper. I never read the Hotspur and wasn't keen on my brother's Warlord. But for some reason, I was an avid collector of Thunder. Surprisingly, I didn't warm to Countdown but did intermittently follow TV Action.
Then MWOM came out and the world would never be the same again.
Ah, The Mighty World of Marvel - 40 years old in 5 days time, Dougie. (It first came out on Sept 30th, 'though dated Oct 7th.)
Yes, indeed. I hope to mark that momentous event on my blog at the weekend!
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