California Dreaming

I lay in bed wide awake around 0430 this morning and for some reason I started thinking about a much wanted pair of skates (pre roller boots) that I was given on around my 8th or 9th birthday.  My birthday is in February and by the time I got home from school and had my tea it was dark and probably freezing outside but I didn't care.  I put my roller skates on and skated to the top of the hill where we lived and skated back down again a hundred times, well until I got called in for bed.

But what I was thinking about this morning was the blonde-haired, faded jeans, converse wearing kids over in California around the time I was skating up and down a hill in a small town in the north west of England.   I was a child of the 70's and every summer was endless.  The sun always shone and rain didn't exist, sadly we didn't have the Pacific Ocean at the end of our street.  Around this time I remember a neighbour coming back from a holiday in the US, we were all so in awe of his haul of American goodies: popping candy, Levi's and more importantly, his skateboard.  It had red polyurethane wheels and even though skateboards weren't my thing it symbolised so much and was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  

And so all this memory rush is to do with a coffee table book that I came across by a photographer called Hugh Holland, titled "The Locals".  Hugh spent the summer of the late 1970's running around the canyons and beaches of LA photographing these kids.  California at the time was in the midst of a drought and most swimming pools were left dry.  These kids would break into back gardens and skate the empty pools until it was their time to go home for tea.  Great photography and if there were a portal in time, I'd want to be part of this gang.   

At the time these photos were taken we were 7,000 miles apart and I know that I would have slotted quite nicely into this life, riding my Cruiser, hanging at the beach, all day, every day.