Richard’s Rendezvous Yesterday’s teenage years, 20s and beyond

We often talk about how kids don’t play outdoors anymore like so many of us used to.

It’s all to do with entertaining themselves with the variety of gadgets available, held between their hands and fingers and other contraptions online and on screen, large or small. By all accounts, these seem to keep them well entertained and, yes, trapped – as so many of them are glued to them indoors and outdoors and just can’t put them down.

All their mobile phones to laptops and all the other various games and bits and pieces that keep them stuck on their screens, but what about older youngsters in their teens, twenties and further?

How did they (or we, as I include myself), keep ourselves entertained?

Nowadays, let’s not leave them out because it’s definitely the use of iPhones and the like, that are very much used also, but places like Chatham, Casemates, Ocean Village are frequented for casual drinks and chats and perhaps further afield in La Linea and other venues in the hinterland.

In the home, the leading global subscription-based streaming service offering, on-demand, a vast library of films, TV series, documentaries etc - Netflix, is a big one, as well as other channels but there’s not so much viewing the usual terrestrial channels today.

Online, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms that keep them busy for much of their day, even in school where there was a need to have them banned whilst in the building, unless allowed to be used for a particular lesson.

There is a great involvement in drama, composing music and singing as soloists or in groups, poetry and so much more. We also have budding authors, other popular hobbies and pastimes are painting, the visual arts in general, photography and certainly not forgetting sport, which is practiced these days in a big, big way.

Many decades ago, some of the above was also the norm but not to the degree we see it practiced nowadays.

Top of the list, as I recall, was cinema-going – perhaps because we didn’t have the variety of what’s available today at home on our much smaller screens.

We listened to the radio. Before 1958, before Radio Gibraltar was launched, you would listen to La Linea radio – Radio Juventud or Radio Algeciras.

Television viewing was just GTV (GBC now), and just two Spanish television channels: TVE 1 and TVE 2 and nothing else. We didn’t have satellite viewing, so no UK channels. I remember being invited to girls birthday parties where you gifted them, more often than not, a box of four bath cubes, I think they were called, and I’m not sure what they were used for. I think they softened the bath water somewhat.

If it was a special girl, you might go the extra mile and gift her the latest top twenty single from Teuma’s record store in Main Street for four shillings and nine pence - later five shillings. But she had to be special.

She was probably the one you eyed in Main Street every evening between 7 and 9pm when we used to stroll up and down from Casemates, more or less, to the Catholic Cathedral and back again, and you know what? It was the most exciting thing ever, when you came close to each other walking with your friends, and her with hers, you glanced at each other and smiled as you passed by. It was total bliss. Happiness forever!

Tea dances were also very popular at places like the CSCA, DSA, etc. There were later ones, en el Patio Policia, Canes, el Polvorin, the Chimney Corner, Penelope, and the one in Turnbull’s Lane which was a very popular venue for local groups and one or two other venues, like Cool Blues, Sax and others that came on the scene after my time.

Even later in the evening, if old enough, the Assembly Rooms, the hotels on the Rock like, the Caleta Palace - the Festival Hall and Catalan Room at the hotel.

For a later, ‘more adult’ venue, there was one at Eastern Beach and one or two others around the place.

Going for meals was not very frequented as there weren’t any restaurants to speak of, apart from Smokey Joe, Las Tres B, that come to mind, or at one of the hotels. Individual restaurants began to appear later.

Beachgoing, as today, was a very big event during summer and somehow managing to carry every creature comfort possible on one of the old, rickety, wobbly buses, and most important, food glorious food: enough food to feed a hundred lifeguards if we had any then.

Trips to beaches in Spain too weren’t uncommon either, to Getares, past Algeciras or maybe to a hotel pool nearby, if you were more affluent.

Yes, it’s ‘all change’ for our younger generation today. A different experience in many ways from how we, in our teenage and twenties years, spent our leisure time, and we were certainly not as affluent as our youth are today. But, we were happy and had much fun.

Observations: I have to immediately announce the observation highlighted last time – the planters by the courts which needed a good lick of paint. They were in fact painted the day of publication of my article. Sorry.

Also the Cathedral clock is now working – Hooray!

The Gibraltar city map machine by South Port Gates, still out of action and has been for many months. Tourists have been spotted trying hard to extract a copy and not having any luck at all.
An empty orange disc opposite the Dr Giraldi Home just past the steel bridge on Winston Churchill Avenue, is looking lonely. Please replace the missing mirror which assists drivers and riders exiting the home.

Do many or any of the Jet Skis, by Marina Bay past Ocean Village, ever get taken out? There are so many of them.

A back street, if ever there was one - Turnbull’s Lane (just one example and there are more). Where is the rubbish some of us still complain about and comment on? A few years back, yes, our streets were not clean but not anymore. Our so called infamous housing estates towards the northern part of Gibraltar are also complained about, but are in fact kept well swept and clean, including the entrances to the blocks. I call it the ‘herd syndrome’, where some issue may have needed addressing badly in the past, but has since been sorted, yet some of us just keep on repeating what is no longer the case. That observation or complaint is no longer valid. Have a walk around as I do and take a look. Let’s not confuse needed licks of paint here and there, some dilapidation, shabbiness and builders debris (there’s enough going on everywhere), with rubbish on the streets. It gives us a bad image.

More observations next time, no doubt. Have a pleasant fortnight.