Memories connected to the song Jammin by Bob Marley

This song always reminds of when I was growing up and flashbacks from the 1970’s; Chopper bikes, an Eddie Mercx racer for Christmas, appropriately timed snow, chimney pots on rooves that looked like owls ears.

Hockey in the jigger with upturned walking sticks and a rubber ball for the puck, spending hours sitting in the pre-cast water pipes that were being laid down the main road, a street party for the queens jubilee, Black Beauty, Dr Who and Top of the Pops. Having a room that was called ‘the parlour’ in a terraced house, screams of ‘your teas on the table’ by my mum from the backyard, being scared of a policeman.

Mousetrap, Buckaroo and scaeletrix. Penny shrimps, fruit salads, space dust and god forbid blackjacks. The baccy, the cowie, bonnie’s field and the wreck. Going looking for bommy wood, snot running down your face in winter, trying to get dog shit out of your trainee with a stick, lamppost’s that were works of art, entries with cobbles on the floor and coal bunkers in the yard.

Birmingham bags, green flash and two tone shirts. Hiding in the coats under the stairs, bobsleighing down the stairs in a cardboard box, trying to jump off the highest stair without knocking yourself out on the landing... Baine’s milk dairy, Finlays and Alexanders, louvre windows, dogs barking during the night, ice on the inside of your bedroom window.

Hide and seek, lallio and bunk-on’s. Stinking shoe cupboards, drop-leaf formica tables and glass coffee tables, but most of all for Mrs. Eckersall’s potatoe cakes which were cooked in old lard and served in an old newspaper with the grease running down the sides; under the current food legislations would be banned and yet could put hairs on your chest in an instant and that was just the girls.

We all thought we were cool because we all thought we were the first to understand this new music that no one had heard of before… reggae