Lost!

Sometimes you have one of those days that will stay with you for the right reasons but at the same time makes you think just a little too much. I have spent the day with my six year old son, not doing a lot but its was a good day. We went for a walk to go look at things that fascinate him, we came home and lit a wood fire in the garden, lit some candles too and spent a while talking about nothing much. It was only a short time later that it dawned on me.

At six years of age I spent a lot of my time out and about, yeah I got into trouble now and then and got a well deserved clip around the ear for it. But my mum never thought twice about sending me and my eight year old brother out to play for the day and we did, everywhere and anywhere with nothing more than a bottle of water and a few pence to get some crisps, we went for miles, often meeting up with other roaming gangs of kids about the same age. We spent many a time using what we found, we built gang huts, we had sled races on nothing more than bin lids or bits of plastic found lying around. Hide and seek would last hours, hell find a derelict house and you found heaven, it was the only place to be. For the most part the worse we did was simple kids mischief and the worse we came across was some miserable old sod that used to chase us away from their front as they didn't like our football hitting their wall.

Now I look at my son, he is six next week and has never been out to play with a gang of kids his own age, he probably wont until he is a good few years older, why? Its not him I don't trust, its the people out there, the scum of the earth that prey on children of his age, yes they were around when I was a kid but the bastards were far and few between and to be honest they were dealt with by the general public, they didn't take kindly to paedophiles or the like, they didn't try to rehabilitate them, they got rid one way or the other. So the odds of coming up against one was remote, now not so, it seems every corner we come across there is one waiting, they have robbed our children of their childhood and whats more we have helped them to do so. We now mollycoddle such offenders and think we can take someone so sick as to rape a child and make them a viable member of society, because left wing liberals feel we must we have let these animals get away with the vilest act that can be done.

Each of us with children of our own are now paying the price by having to deny our children their innocence, I for one don't like to have to sit and warn my six year old son of the horrors that might exist out there, why should I? My children should be able to simply learn to grow up the way we did, we should not have to put up with this.