Making our own fun. Friday 24th April - Australia - 6671 cases 1460 Active - 262 per million population

Much is being made at the moment of "making one's own fun", of how dressing up in silly costumes to wheel the bin to the front footpath can relieve the boredom of life in quasi-lockdown.  

Readers of this blog with sharp eyes and long memories will know that wearing silly hats is not at all a new phenomenon, that spending one's formative years  (before the middle of the last century) on a small island where "shopping" was meeting the ship carrying the monthly mail-ordered supplies, meant that one's own fun was the only kind of fun to be had.

When I was young, Barbecues for instance, weren't just a means of charring sausages, they were an event.  A huge event.

Enough food and drink to feed a family at least four times the size of ours would be prepared, the fire would be lit early, to allow sufficient time for the cooking plate to be evenly heated, and we'd all be dressed in our going-out clothes before marching into the back yard to sit around on a bit of concrete that was actually the lid of the septic tank. We'd even take paper serviettes as they were known before they were called napkins.

My father and I would also have to don silly outfits, chefs caps and aprons with slogans like "What's Cooking?" on them. I'm not sure what my parents were thinking to subject me to the dual embarrassment of watching my father dressed like that while being similarly attired, but it did have something of a lasting impact on my sartorial habits.

My siblings, being just enough years younger than I to have avoided the need to don funny hats while eating outdoors, have no doubt made their way through life with substantially fewer emotional scars as well.

Have your fun by all means.  When you next with wheelie bin in tow, waddle down to the kerb, why not do it dressed as a teddy bear wearing a tutu?  Just remember if you do, that there is a risk that more than sixty years from now someone will stumble across the photo and in instant they will quite possibly understand the exact point at which their gene pool went awry.