Last week I asked readers to choose the next post(s) from my list by picking the numbers of different posts. This completely random allocation of posts has bought some great memories to the top of the list. So this is the first of them, chosen by Gavin.
As a kid when the school holidays came around particularly the long summer break we mostly used to make our own fun. When we could, and were able to persuade a parent to give us a lift one of the things we liked to do was go and mess about in canoes.
At a nearby lake you could hire a kayak, Canadian canoe or a row boat by the half-hour. In effect this was as long as you wanted when they weren’t busy. We’d go, hire out a boat each or if there were a few of us share a Canadian canoe, rarely a rowboat. Then we would literally mess about in boats.
The lake is shared with coarse fisherman, so you had to be careful not to get too close to the fishing slips or you’d upset the fisherman if you got tangled in their lines, but anywhere else was fair game. We’d have races between buoys and waterfights - how we never actually sank one another is probably more than a matter of luck than judgement, and the fact that water pistols back then weren’t quite the super-soakers of today. Try and see if we could work out how deep the lake actually was, although we never did come up with an answer to that.
Typically we’d come back to shore much, much wetter than when we went in but having had the best time and pretty exhausted which I suspect rated highly on the parental scale. On good days, if the persuaded parent had hung around - they’d often walk a dog around the perimeter of the lake - we’d also get treated to an ice cream from the little shack that was next to the little playground by the side of the lake. In hindsight I suspect this was to let us dry out a bit before we were packed back into a car. We’d go home happy and exhausted and hoping that we could do the same again tomorrow or perhaps next week.
I’m not quite sure when this stopped being a thing though, perhaps when we got to secondary school and there were more things to do during the holidays, but last year I revisited the lake.
It was a sort of a spur of the moment thing, our vet’s main practice is nearby and I had to stop in and pick some pills up for one of the dogs. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I thought I take one of the dogs with me and we’d go and take a walk around the lake.
It was much busier than I remember it being when I was a kid and we were lucky to find a parking spot, but we did our walk. Inevitably the place has changed a bit. The ice cream shack is now a much bigger, properly constructed cafe. The playground equipment has been improved, but I’d swear that some of it is still the stuff that was there 40+ years ago. You can still hire boats - although at the time that was closed due to Covid - and they still have a similar selection but have added pedalos to the fleet. We had a nice walk, and there’s now a boardwalk that takes you out over the water that wasn’t there when I was a kid.
I’d say it’s changed quite a bit, but at the same time is very much the place I remember from my childhood and although the numbers of people about made me feel slightly uncomfortable because of Covid, it was nice to see that it is still so well used.
I don’t think I’ll ever make it out on to the water in a kayak again, but never say never, however I could see me going back again for a walk around. It’s a great resource for the area and one I’m please to see is still going strong.
I hope you enjoyed that memory snapshot, I’ll be posting the others that have been chosen over the coming weeks.