Thoughts

This thought has been pinballing around my head for a while. So I will put it down on “paper” to exorcise it.

My parents really did limit me.

I grew up in a shit satellite town. No honestly there is something wrong about the place, its like a dog that's been beaten, everyone has a expression of “given up” on their faces. The wikipedia entry for it is depressing.

Yet for their own reasons (reasons which at approaching age 40 I do understand, yet still don't agree with) My parents settled in the town. And spent my formative years limiting my horizons to those four grey walls.
I grew up never once being told “You can do better than this,” These four walls this lower middle class existence. Aspire to mediocrity, “Oh don't aim for University your not clever enough, you will come out of University in debt.” there's a technical college down the road where you can lean the basics, where drinking beer and playing pool were part of the curriculum.
Before that when I was a younger child I though a day trip to Chester (taken every summer, to buy the school uniform at M&S) was a event, I thought Chester was a metropolis. As for Manchester and Liverpool? Too big too dangerous.
I attended a universally shit school, where the teachers devoted 90% of their energy to the top 5% of the pupils, and if you weren't in that top 5%...Well the Bacon Factory's allays hiring. My parents attended one school parents induction where they came back complaining that the head teacher was too fond of her own voice (true). They never bothered with any other school events, Yet were happy to send me there for 5 years.
As teens were were provinciallll, it was the 1980's and we were Rockers adorning our denim with 70's bands like Led Zep and Thin Lizzy or “Casuals”-proto chavs in sportswear and cheap fashion.

If the town had had a cinema then it would have banned such films as “Life of Brian” but a Cinema was too exotic and it was turned into a bingo hall before I was born.

Am I being over dramatic? I don't think so.
We never travelled, Our holidays were not holidays, they where breaks away from the place, but they still took those attitudes away with them, a succession of “holiday camps” where we continued our boring lifestyle in a chalet instead of a house, with my parents drinking themselves into oblivion. The pair of them escaping reality into books, rather than trying to enhance their reality.

Every county, every county has towns like this. So while my environment was dull as ditch water. My nurturing was where it mattered. Children's horizons must be stretched not restricted, And this can be done through any number of ways. From something as simple as telling you kids “You can do anything.” to showing a interest in them and their choices, even if you don't agree with them, a little bit of support goes a long long way. To showing them that the world is larger. Constantly stimulate them, with history, with all types of culture from fashion and banksy to museums and music, show them the scope and scale of the world. Turn the radio over from “local radio” with its endless news of petty crime and road closures to radios 3 and 4 let them experience the passion of music or the excitement of debate.

Maybe its because I'm a Magician and I do believe that we can change our reality through acts, that I don't feel the need to escape it.
But my children and stepchildren, I never ever, try and limit.