THIS IS CORNY BUT I LIKED IT

According to today's bureaucrats and regulators, those of us who were kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s probably shouldn't have survived...

• We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

• When we rode our bikes we wore no helmets, just flip flops, shorts and brightly colored clackers on our wheels.

• As kids, if our family had a car, we would travel without seatbelts or airbags. Traveling in the front was a treat.

• We drank water from the garden hose and public fountains - not from a bottle. It tasted exactly the same!

• We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always playing outside.

• We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or one can and nobody ever got ill as a result.

• We would spend hours building go karts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find out we had forgotten about brakes. After running into stinging nettles and bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.

• We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one minded.

• We did not have Playstations and X Boxes - no video games at all. No 99 TV channels, no videos, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no internet chat rooms. We had friends. -We went outside and found them.

• We played football, elastics and street rounders - and sometimes that ball really hurt!

• We fell out of trees, got cuts and grazes, broken bones and broken teeth and there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learned not to do the same things again.

• We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue. We did not get assaulted -we simply lost a fight. We learned to get over it.

• We walked to each others homes and school.

• We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate live things, and although we were told it would happen, we did not have our eyes fall out and nor did live stuff grow inside us.

• We rode our bike in packs of seven and wore our coats only by the hood.

• Our actions were our own and the consequences were expected.

• The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

• This generation has produced some of the best risk takers, problem solvers and inventors ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with them.