Watching

The long hot summers of yesteryear spent with carefree friends undertaking careless activities are some of the sweetest memories I can recall.

The memories are as vivid as if all this happened yesterday. The day the school year ended was like an early Christmas, as it marked a moment in time never to be repeated and heralded in the expectation of pure freedom, where life could be sculpted as art for the brave beholder.

The truth is that we were not great kids. We weren't the worst but we were far from the best. It felt like we were always on the lookout for just a little bit of innocent trouble and adventure. Or somehow, it always seemed to find us.

Softened by life experience, I look back on these times and hunger for such freedom again. Playing cricket for days on end, riding our bikes everywhere, chatting up girls, stealing a cigarette from our friend's mum, and tasting the booze kept at the back of the cabinet, hoping no one would notice that slowly but surely it was evaporating.

Summer holidays always felt like six weeks of total freedom, where we would all grow far more than the previous school year. It was a time where we were free to find our way, make our own mistakes, learn our lessons and take our punishment that was often well deserved.

None of us had much in the way of money or possessions. We were just a group of ragtag friends, thrown together by circumstance. We all lived in the same housing commission area, we all went without and we all understood why. It simply wasn't a big deal; we had each other and at that point in our lives, that seemed like enough.

It was a simple existence that, to this day, still makes me smile.

It was a simple existence that allowed me to build a complicated life, forever in search of the simplicity of summer holidays again.