Around Each Others' Houses

I didn't tend to invite other kids round my house coz I didn't have any cool stuff. One's social standing at school was governed by whether or not you had things like a computer to play games, a pool table ect ect at your home. I didn't have anything like that so I never invited anyone round much coz they'd think (or I thought they'd think) that there was no point.

My family bought a VCR early on, so for a short while before everybody else did my house had a short reign of popularity.

I hated going to my friend Saras place because she had a little sister also called Hanna so their mum would call me Barbro (my middle name) and everybody giggled.

1. Having people at mine no fun due to cranky mom with back problems recuperating from her working day. Extreme lack of intellectual stimulation at home. Also hated/was embarrassed by nuclear family, as is often the case.

2. Nellie opinionated and fun. One of those people who appear to be super-straight but is actually eccentric as all get out. Still. She'd moved from south Minneapolis and so was sophisticated about city matters, political, and crucially into New Wave everything. SGS actually reminds me of a more willowy version of Nellie.

3. Nellie's dad, who was the same age as my grandfather, is a MAD SCIENTIST and ancient and posh English to boot (how posh? His father's name was Ovid and they were related to John Gay). Her mom was one of the chief librarians for Hennepin County and did Middle German so as to read Gregorius in the original for one of her degrees (she had a PhD, her brother founded the policy school at the U of M). They were the most educated people in a 5-mile radius and they treated me like a satellite child.

4. Afternoon tea in huge mugs with two kinds of cake every day at 4 pm and Nellie's dad telling us stories about taking the Metropolitan Line to Aldersgate to go to the only school that offered a real science curriculum in 1920, when his folks were looking for schools for him. Cambridge, between the wars. Totally responsible for my soft spot for well-educated, well-spoken British males who cuss well. He extended the cellar and called it a 'priest hole'. Recently Nellie's dad told me he'd been to Germany in his gap year, had seen a Nazi rally starring Hitler and had found himself disgusted. He said it was a wretched disgust unlike anything he'd ever felt before, and that he'd felt it again watching Bush preach to his converted, talking about crusades. He's 90 and tends to hit rewind a bit now, but is otherwise sharp as.

5. Nellie's mom and her refusal to toe the Stepford party line in our area. Was once majorly dissed by my mom for not putting on makeup to visit shops etc, and for walking everywhere (my mom was perplexed by this in a WTF? way). Nellie's mom replied that as this was only St. Louis bloody Park she didn't feel like making the effort to buy groceries but that she did polish up quite nicely when invited to dinner with the Emperor of Japan. Nellie and I are extremely good at throwing shade as a result (and our mums get on).

:(

In keeping with the cliché´nobody locked the doors and kids were in and out of everywhere, but until my friend moved in across the street I was the oldest kid in the neighbourhood and had nobody to play with apart from marshalling my little sister's friends into games of Kick the Can, which got boring.

Your name is Hanna-Barbro? You must've been the coolest kid in school, what with all your cartoon-making skills an' all.

I always went to my friend Th0mas H3n3k3r's house cos he has a gypsy caravan and an old phone box in his garden, and that was really cool. Also, my mate J0s3ph 4l4ns0n had that brilliant game involving rolling marbles down a complicated track of ones own making, and a substantial forest behind his house. Poor lad died in school, however, so we couldn't go round anymore.

I didn't have them in school, I didn't have them out of school, so it wouldn't have made a sausage of difference where we hung out.

Well, until my late teens that is. Then we usually hung out at my house because I had a whole wing to run around and make noise, while they had to make do with tiny apartments/trailers that they shared with their mums.

We used to knock on each others doors and ask "Are you playing?" which seems sort of funny to me now.

When I was a teenager, and we'd moved out of that house, hanging out tended to be almost exclusively at Denny's, but it if wasn't, it was at my place again -- because I cooked, surprise surprise. (Hamburgers, stir fries, and Buffalo wings, oh so impressive.) At this point, my mother always worked, four to five jobs, which was a selling point to other teenagers who knew an adult would never be home.

Oddly until I was about 9 or 10 I didn't get to know the guys who actually lived really really near, I forget how I started hanging out with them but we'd always be in each others houses. I am still friends with most of them.

Oddly the one I disliked most at the beginning, is now far and away the one I get along best with, to the point where I wonder how I can even relate to some of the others anymore.

My mother was a bit off-putting to my friends, always firing questions at them and bring generally nosy. Consequently I used to spend a lot of time out with friends or in their houses. I had one or two friends who were intimidated by my 4 lovely sisters..they wouldn't admit it outright, but used to nervously ask if they were going to be in. I didn't really have any cool stuff, in fact *any* stuff really until I was about 12 or so and started buying records and books. Then again, in the early 70's there wasn't much cool stuff to be had. I'd be interested to hear what stuff other grey panthXORS like Marcello, Mark S and Martin had when they were lads (alright I realise that mark s probably made his own time machine). I only had a bike and a football that I can remember. Unless it was raining hard, we used to be outdoors all the time. My friend Jeff had a full-size snooker table in his house which was a big draw - I honed my cue skills by playing marathon best of 257 frames matches on that table.