Summer is upon us dear reader and that means the school holidays.

As well as quiet roads on the morning commute, it means that parents across the area are praying for nice weather so they don’t have to keep their children in the house all day.

In know it’s an oft repeated cliche, but in my youth (and I’m only in my mid 30s) I remember leaving the house for a game of football, then a marathon game of cricket before heading home for lunch.

“What have you been doing this morning?” my mum would ask?

I wouldn’t reply as I was trying to cram a Mighty White and jam sandwich into my face as fast as humanly possible.

“How did you get that cut on your knee?” she would ask.

Again she’d get a stony silence as I attempted to drink my own weight in Kia-Ora diluting pop in under a minute before rushing off for an afternoon’s adventures.

What would these adventures entail? Well it’d be something like a game of ‘relivio’ which, if memory serves, is a bit like a team hide-and-seek with the ability to free compadres who had been caught by the other side.

We also used to play some sort of chase game in which the chasers gave the other side a head start and the ones being chased chalked their direction on a series of arrows around the streets.

I don’t really remember anyone complaining about chalk all over the roads - maybe Yorkshire always has had an affinity with the Tour de France.

But the prime occupation of any young man in the summer holidays was the creation of the den. It could be up a tree, down a hole, in the corner of a garden but in general a ‘den’ required at least three sides and to be created from matter found around and about.

We used to spend ages rigging up tree branches to the right position then draping across plastic sheeting (which we’d just found) and then ripping up handfuls of grass and dock leaves to camouflage our den.

Once done it was place of wonderment - part castle, part private boudoir, all ours.

I suppose it was the Thatcherite dream of home ownership made real - albeit on a very minor scale.

I certainly don’t remember their being any fuss about the Government’s ‘Right to Buy’ your den off the council. Maybe I was drinking too much Kia-Ora at the time. That and Tizer.

In the end I was banned from imbibing the red fizzy drink after my parents discovered me shadow boxing the back of the settee after I’d moved all the furniture round in the lounge.

The only thing better than creating a den was stealing one from other poor unsuspecting group.

They’d toddle off home for their tea at the end of the day and you could swoop and do some real damage - you know, knocking off the grass camouflage and ... actually that’s about it.

But if your den was ever attacked it was a bitter blow. Vows were sworn, palms were spit on and hands were shaken in oaths that would last forever.

Until at least the next day when you heard about a stream near a farmers field that had been dammed with straw and then filled up with bales so you had a big trampoline with the added bonus that someone would fall through the straw into the mucky water below.

I’m not sure what kids today do during the summer holidays. I’d like to think they get out and about coming home with grass stained clothes, cut knees and unusual bruises.

My fear is that they end up playing consoles, texting and then going into town to mooch around.

If so, then it’s their loss - but it’s also ours. I know times change and the world alters along with it but it would be a crying shame if youngsters were stopped from running wild (a bit) in the summer holidays.

We all hears moans about kids sitting in their rooms, well this is the perfect opportunity to roust them out to get some sunshine on their pallid skins.

And I’ll keep my eyes out for unguarded dens while I’m out and about - old habits die hard!