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Sabian ExpressionsAPPETITEGemini 6 - 10
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7 Words QuestionnaireAddictionAre you controlling your appetites?
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Joie de VivreBy James Burgess
Rodway Common was where we went when we couldn’t think of anything else to do. If Clive was out with his dad, his football was usually with him, so we had to come up with new ideas. In the 1950s that centred on outdoorsy things like catching snakes, stealing apples from a neighbour’s tree and putting pennies on the railway line to see how they looked after they'd been squashed by a freight train. An oasis of green in an increasingly suburban environment, Rodway had lots of special features to delight a 10-year-old's appetite for adventure. There would often be kite-fliers, cricketers, footballers and picnickers, and sometimes we'd see hand-holders and kissers, old couples in their 40s wheeling babies in their buggies across the uneven turf, and teams of rugby-types in training. We loved them all – but the expression of our love was most often misinterpreted – as rude, cheeky, naughty or downright insolent. That didn't matter because we would always be able to run faster than the victims of our teasing and mischief-making. Early on in the game we had learned a special secret – we would always run towards the hill, and carry on running down getting faster and faster until we reached flat ground at the bottom. We fell to the earth then, on the flat, and we laughed. We knew that no one else would dare the descent at break-neck speed. Old people, (and for us that meant 30+), would always be afraid of falling over. And indeed, if they tried to slow down or stop on the slope, then invariably they would. We lived a helter-skelter kind of life, always in the fast lane and always wanting more; the thought never crossed our minds that anything was dangerous and ill-advised. When the hill's steep slope forced the pace, then the appropriate behaviour was not to slow down but to scream with delight and run faster! I thank my lucky stars that no one ever managed to teach me anything different, and all these decades later my joie de vivre is undiminished. |
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