I miss being indestructible.
I feel like I left it all on the field. I wasn’t even a dare devil, but I broke more than a few bones. Ribs, wrist, ankle, several fingers. Tearing ACLs is where I drew the line. Some stuff doesn’t heal.
It’s still good to have a sense of what is possible if necessary.
No parents. No Internet. Very limited home entertainment. Full boredom.
Growing up Gen-X was like a perpetual episode of Jackass starring The Goonies.
Elder millennial, youngest sibling here:
A gen x older brother was a master class in being a crash test dummy
We jumped off buoys and navigation markers as a kid.
Sure it was water below but under the water … the supports and ladders of the buoys, mangled barnacle mess.
And the ospreys.
Goddamn did an angry osprey make jumping off the buoy that much more exciting, a little bit of “and maybe we’ll get attacked by a raptor” excitement….
Comrade here jumping into an ocean full of sharks and is worried about being attacked by birds…
Veeeeery few sharks in the bay I was jumping into.
Osprey on the other hand will actively rip your face off for getting too close to their nest.
Very few sharks implies some sharks which are way too many for this guy.
I don’t fuck with apex predators.
Comrade over here forgetting that birds descended from dinosaurs.
Comrade here forgetting that not only do sharks predate dinosaurs, but - unlike birds - have hardly changed.
Orcas are still kings of the oceans, and it seems they’ve finally decided they’ve had enough of our shenanigans, so maybe we should be more worried about them that either of the others.
I too was a bay child. We’d use the barnacle covered chains holding the buoys in their place to pull ourselves down to the bottom for whatever reason
I have a scar on my left leg from where I slipped on the ladder abd sliced my calf open on barnacles.
It bled till it didn’t. And I survived.
I’m pretty sure I’d die of some terrible infection if it had happened today.
Completely off-topic, but apparently in UK English they pronounce buoy like “boy”, which, like, phonetically is fine but it’s definitely wrong. Or feels wrong. "We jumped off boys. " Utter madness
Absolute bastards, idk how the English could ruin English so much….
How the fuck do you say buoy then?
Boo-ee, rhymes with bluey. Before you say anything about that word not being phonetic, one, I already said that, and, two, Lieutenant.
We used to jump off the roof into a snowbank. Then when the snow got deep enough we would just sled off the roof onto the snowbank.
Well shit, 80s kid here and we kinda did this. We had a pile of old mattresses and cushions. The mattresses were the super cheap and crappy kind with no springs so were actually really good for landing on. The ground floor of our house was maybe 6ft higher than the back garden and we had a kinda small raised patio at the back door with steps down into the garden. We piled up the mattresses on the lawn, beyond the flower bed. And threw ourselves off the wall at the edge of the patio down onto the mattresses. Lots of fun.
My siblings and I used those same mattresses to slide down our stairs, crashing into them at the bottom. That was fun too.
I also remember finding these long smooth metal sheets somewhere and using them to make a slide down our garden steps. Then using a sledge sliding down it and crashing into the mattresses.
I miss those days.
Did you ever jump apparently 5+ stories up, trying to hit a 3ft/1m-wide target?
Oh all the time. Sometimes while riding a tiger. It was the style at the time.
That would be a hard pass for me.
That’s crazy!
But it looks like crazy fun…
1980s England wasn’t the most sheltered place I guess
1980s everywhere
Really? Given your history, West Germany as well?
Everywhere, really.
Well at least the places i went to school. Germany ( It was West Germany back then ), Brazil, USA and Colombia.
I feel like all the sheltering came around in the 90s.
I mean, I’m guessing some of the 90s sheltering was maybe in response to the crazy 80s
And then after playing head inside and watch ma’s Corrie and make her a proper cuppa I remember these days I do
I did this in the 70s!!! good old days :)
Holy shit!!! We did that too! And we did it inside the building too.
Good, clean fun.
I did that until i knocked a kidney stone loose at 14
