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An Incident from the Summer of Frankie Says Relax
Drunken ‘commando raid’ goes predictably wrong
When I was a young lad, my family and I were moved from a soon-to-be-demolished downstairs flat that was infested with mice, to a brand new three bedroom house on a nearby estate. The move sparked a lot of change in my life; there were new friends to hang out with, I had my own bedroom, whose walls I would festoon with posters, and an inside toilet, which allowed me to go about my business free of the company of woodlice.
Garden Hopping
As my friends and I settled in to our new habitat, we partook of street games of the day; fox and hounds, knock-door-ginger, and a new nocturnal pastime that would inject a little excitement into our lives, garden hopping.
The aim of this new sport was to climb over a wall into someone’s back garden and creep across all adjoining gardens towards an adjacent wall, negotiating obstacles on the way, such as fences, clothes lines, ponds and suchlike, without being discovered. If the second wall was reached and scaled, the mission was deemed a success. I didn’t realise it at the time, but my training in that field would come in useful years later, when I was an adult.
