JODIE: OK what about if we went on to play a game or hit hard. I mean what games do you play these days?. Do you play games? Do you play out on the street? Do you sit down, and…?

PETER: We play football.

JODIE: You what, sorry?

PETER: Play football and other stuff like. Sometimes you just play deadarms or something like that.

JODIE: And what’s that?

PETER: You punch them on the arm, and the first one to give up, or something like that.

JODIE: Oh all right. That sounds quite painful! Lynnie do you remember that?

LYNNIE: I can remember me brother giving me a dead arm but I can’t remember ever playing it for fun!

KAREN: I never played that, definitely not, I don’t like pain!

JODIE: What did you use to play when you were at school?

KAREN: Skipping. Two balls.

LYNNIE: Two balls. That was quite popular wasn’t it? Our Karen cleaned up when she was little. She was Cinderella. What did we play? Usually making up shows.

KAREN: Hide and seek. Hide and seek or kick the can.

JODIE: What was that?

LYNNIE: Where you kick the can, and… I can’t remember how to play kick the can. It would definitely be antisocial behaviour now. Anything that we played when we were kids would be antisocial behaviour now.

JODIE: You laughed then. Why?

STEPHEN: (laughter)

JODIE: What kind of games did you play? I mean obviously the games that the kids play these days, do you think there is any influence about, you know, what they do than what they used to do in the past?

STEPHEN: I don’t have a clue. I play togenhow(?), that’s footie. Games I played when I was a kid? Manholes. I think the games were different back in the day from what they are now because everything just moved on, hasn’t it? Er, dunno…

LYNNIE: Kids play less now don’t they?

JODIE: Say that again.

LYNNIE: Kids play less but also kids play outside less. And they can’t amuse themselves as much as they could without costing money, I would say, because basically they’ve got video games.

KAREN: Play stations.

LYNNIE: They’ve got loads of stuff to keep them in the house so when they’re out they’re bored so they get up to no good, whereas we were thrown out to play cos you didn’t have video games but you amused yourself without money cos you played…you were happy with two balls which cost 30 pence each and you could play for hours with a piece of rope as a skipping rope. Now kids will play for like 5 minutes, say they’re bored cos their retention and their… now it’s like, well I reckon if we got kids skipping it would last, you know, 20 minutes and then they’d be bored. Where we would just play skipping all day.

PETER: Something… what was I gonna say? Yeah, when you get grounded, right, and when you, when you don’t get grounded, you don’t feel like going out, but when you get grounded you wanna go out bad.

KAREN: Like you are at the moment.

LYNNIE: Yeah, Pete is grounded, aren’t you Pete? For drinking vodka on the dunnies. Way to go, Pete! (Laughs.)

JODIE: What about grounded? I mean like obviously that, you know, when you were grounded was that kind of something that’s obviously…I mean I remember being grounded when I was a kid. Do you remember being grounded when you were kids?

KAREN: I got grounded for a month, a full month.

LYNNIE: I did as well. Both of us did for a full month and we weren’t allowed to go out. A full month!

KAREN: And we got a beating as well as the grounding. You’re very lucky

LYNNIE: We did. For a full month and we were not allow to move out.

KAREN: We had no tellies in the bedroom. No playstations. No gameboys. Nothing.

LYNNIE: We had broken into the school, mind! We were little horrors by the way, weren’t we? We were naughty. We’re not now, but we were.