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I loved making minature gardens, don't think anyone makes them now.

Aged 5 when we moved house, I was thrilled to find a pond in a field nearby. I was even more excited to find that there were newts in it, I'd never seen any before an watched them for ages.

I used to love climbing!!

Rock pooling with my brother. We'd spend hours filling our buckets with crabs and shrimps.

Playing outside especially in the local park. We would play on the swings and slide , hide and seek , rounders or whatever it was all good fun.

Tree climbing and den building!

I had lots of activities as a child which I loved. Skipping either on my own or with double ropes with my friends. Hopscotch. Playing 2 ball against a wall or playing hide and seek.

Playing tennis against a wall. I was going to be the next Billie Jean King!

Spent many school holidays putting on small shows of plays/dancing/singing with friends in our front gardens for friends and neighbours to come and watch. It was so much fun.

Has to be fairy liquid water slide in the garden, into the flower-bed!

Playing football with my friends on street

I used to love rollerskating when I was younger. My sister and I used to go to the local park with our friends and skate for what seemed like hours.

Playing 2 ball e, as we called it in the north east ie juggling 2 balls against wall whilst singing various rhymes. Also loved all the Street games.

Packing up sandwiches and riding off around the countryside with a like-minded horse mad friend to visit horses in their fields over to the fence so we could stroke them. We took chopped carrots especially - the wobbly ones our mums didn’t want for cooking.

One farmer once told us to get on his pony (a piebald named Lassie I remember) as she stood beside us as we perched on the fence. I nearly did, but hadn’t been on a horse in my life so chickened out.

I had my first riding lesson with my first pay packet on a cold wet day in January. I’m still rather keen on horses!

Riding my bike to the beach, about three miles away. Sometimes just a couple of us, other times up to a dozen friends & friends of friends. We'd play games & swim, only going home when we got hungry.

Building dens over in the farmer's field behind our house, dragging fold up chairs and an orange box to use as furniture, begging jam sandwiches and bottles of pop off my mum and having picnics there. The boys would tie a rope to the oak tree's biggest branch and we'd use it to swing across the brook, often falling in but never bothering,just drying off as we played.

Making perfume out of flowers and water

French Skipping.

I used to love my brown suede rollerskates - I would spend hours skating up and down my road at the weekend!

I had a swing attached to the back door frame and spent hours swinging between the yard and the back alley.

When I was a child we loved to play imaginary games. We could keep them going for days...weeks even in the long summer holidays. With little more than an old bed sheet we could become Princes and princesses, evil step mothers, chalet boarding school children on some mountain in Switzerland (my personal favourite) , dragons, monsters..... you name it and we each had a staring role. Happy days.

Simply just going to the park to play on the swings

Hopscotch was a favourite outdoor game of mine, not sure how the chalk marks on the pavement would go down in the present time!

Our dear cat loved being the centre of attention, so much so that she loved being pushed around the garden in my vintage dolls pram. I would cover her up with a lovely lace shawl which my mum made so she wouldn't be cold and we would take it in turns with my sister to push her around the garden.

My best outdoor treat was at wild strawberry time! Our family lived not far from Chenies and Latimer and there was an idyllic walk we went on where we could gather wild strawberries. I still recall the joy of spotting those juicy, scarlet jewels amongst the leaves, low on the ground, and popping each one into my mouth, savouring the slightly sharp glorious sweetness on my tongue. I felt such pride when my father praised my strawberry-hunting skills and said I had 'eagle eyes'. That walk was my happy place; I would clamour to visit again and again, even once strawberry time was past. Heavenly!