Nowt so weird as folk
Why playtime for adults won’t bring your childhood back.
Is this a thing? No, really, is this a thing? If you live in Seattle, you may now participate in something called Adult Recess, which aims to recreate the joys of an American school break time, with kickball, hopscotch, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - but minus the bullying. “I thought back to the last time when I really had fun, and it was these games when I was a kid,” the event organiser told the Wall Street Journal. This is the latest iteration of “kidulting”, a word that should be outlawed but which does pinpoint something real. San Francisco has an adult recess, too, and you can play with Play-Doh at one library in Ohio. There are also several examples of what Americans call “sleepaway camps” aimed at grownups, including at least one in Britain. Oh, and there’s an adult ball pit in Shoreditch, east London, because of course there is.
And after quivering and crying 'The horror! the horror!', I am inclined to dissent from Mr Burkeman's notion that You think that what you enjoyed about being nine was playing swingball, tag, and grandma’s footsteps; but what you really enjoyed was not having a mortgage or rent to pay, no mouths to feed, no marital tensions to negotiate. The other stuff was just how you filled the resulting acres of free time; it was how you expressed your freedom, but it wasn’t the cause of it.
This all assumes that bliss it was at the age of nine to be alive etc etc and to be playing swingball and tag was very heaven, and okay, maybe was an unusually introverted and antisocial brat but I fancy I would rather have been indoors with a good book.
And one of the really great things about Being A Grown-Up is, No More School Playground.
Many years ago - many, many, many years ago - I read Joanna Cannan's I Wrote A Pony Book (which certainly dates from before the 1977 given as its publication date on Goodreads, 1950 seems more like it), in which the schoolgirl protag writes a pony book and her bestie illustrates it. And when they go and see a publisher, he likes it but says isn't the heroine of the book rather miserable and unchildlike? and our heroine asks how he was as a child, and he says, strange and moody and unchildlike, and she says, that's how young people are, not the happy bunnies that adult writers of kiddie-lit make them out to be (not in those exact words). On the other hand, protag and her bestie are also shown as being a bit estranged from their fellows at boarding school... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2975779.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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