SO it’s nearly the school summer holidays and most families will have their own precious memories of the long break.

Yet these are too-often unnoticed at the time.

Most parents spend too much of the summer fussing about all the money being spent, keeping the kids entertained for weeks on end.

My childhood school memory was of an eternal stretch of time in Sahara-dessert like weather growing up in a decade of power cuts, ITV strikes, no petrol, no refuse collections and standpipes.

The first week of the holidays was always a trip down Lawkholme Lane with mum to Peter Black’s for some cheap trainers and a pair of playing-out jeans, which lasted me throughout the holidays.

The Back to School advertising always ruined the trip and killed the buzz.

Holidays often meant getting up early to spend the day playing at granny’s house whilst mum went to work, but the summer holiday TV was good in those days with Tarzan, Champion the Wonder Horse, Double Deckers and not forgetting Robinson Crusoe.

These kept us going till dinnertime, but looking back it was just adverts to sell toys the whole of August.

We were never bored – we held table-top jumble sales, played Tracking, or had trips out on our Chopper bikes.

We made dens in the woods with not a care in the world, coming in sweaty with our entire body covered in grime, and mum always insisting on a bath before tea.

The Mr Whippy ice cream van always had perfect timing: we rushed out with mum’s biggest bowl from the cupboard to fill up for tea, and any leftovers were always made into ice cream soda drinks with lemonade, if we were good!

We always had a week away at a holiday camp in the Keighley feast weeks, with plenty of spending money our grandparents had saved up in a big whiskey bottle over the year.

We could buy the Dandy and Beano summertime special spin-off comics to take on our car journey to entertain us, along with with the odd game of I Spy and who could spot Blackpool Tower first.

The weeks went by... remembering that you still had homework to complete, but not worrying about it until tomorrow.

Then the final week was upon us and it always meant mum telling her friend she’d had enough now and couldn’t wait for school to start again, and to be honest I felt the same way after getting my new over-sized school uniform to grow into.