Banana Woofwoof has written a beautiful piece on lost childhood over at Cook’d and Bomb’d spin-off Blog’d. I won’t quote any of it here, just read it for yourself and if you make it to the end without weeping like a big girl then you’re a stronger person than I.

It made me think about my own childhood though; I never really had “adventures” like BWW did, and although I used to do the usual playing things boys growing up in the 80s did (playing football and cricket, riding bikes around, that sort of thing) I never did anything that still sticks in my mind as a strong childhood memory. Even back then I was quite geeky, and my brother and I would spend hours playing on our old Sinclair Spectrum and Atari 2600 (we later got an Amiga A500, then an A1200 and a CD32 but I was well into my teens by then and computing had lost its gentle childhood innocence). Sometimes I would draw adverts for games that I’d made up in my head; they would invariably follow the template of the old Ocean adverts, consisting of an illustration (usually a childishly blocky tank or something) with a big logo at the top (the gloriously cack-handed DEATH SYNDROME was one particularly memorable title) and a row of “screenshots” along the bottom. I slavishly copied the ads I saw in magazines right down to the detail of listing prices for the various formats; the Spectrum versions were always £7.95 or £8.95, the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions would be £1-2 more and if you wanted it on disk it’d be another £5 on top. If I was feeling charitable I’d even make a BBC Micro version for the posh kids (and an Acorn Electron one for the posh kid wannabes).

I was never a particularly solitary child though; plenty of other kids at school had Spectrums so we would swap games with each other (often indulging in the illicit contraband of a C60 mixtape of your favourite games), go round to each other’s houses to play them or show off your latest acquisition, that sort of thing. “Social gaming” isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon as far as I’m concerned.

Luckily, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of “cool kids” and “nerdy kids” I somehow managed to place myself in the union of the two groups, meaning I was able to indulge my nerdish but never really suffered for it. Oh, no doubt both sets of peers mocked me behind my back (and it was definitely done to my face on multiple occasions) but adjusting my geekishness to fit the company I’m in is something I like to think I’ve done a reasonable job of since then.

So did I waste my childhood? If a good childhood is one full of specific memories then yes, I suppose I did; but if being happy is reason enough to think of your childhood as a good one then… well, it would be a “no” — and a most emphatic one at that.