We called that "In & Out" because the first two were "Inside and Outside"

Yeah, that's right. "In, on, out..." and then a lot of stuff about bananas and granny's knickers.

There may have been stuff there I missed last time I heard it.

My aunt loves to tell the story of being in France and watching several young French girls playing Chinese Jump Rope -- the kind where you have to jump in and out in various complicated patterns, adding a layer of complexity each time you successfully complete a sequence. These girls? Were wearing buckle shoes.

For the life of them, they couldn't get beyond level 2; they kept catching the rope on the buckles of their shoes, and they refused to take off their shoes and do it barefoot.

My childhood years involved a lot of ranging around the neighborhood -- okay, 3-4 houses' back yards and a patch of woods; we lived on a busy street -- and thinking we were wild creatures, when really, there was a stay at home mom in at least one of the houses, and I'm sure she kept more of an eye on us than I realized at the time.

Of course, we never played pickup baseball; we played spy and war and secret foot-traps in a sandbox about as big as a bathtub.

We used to play "British" Bulldog growing up.

We played a version where the object was to run from one side of the play area to the other with out getting tackled (or tagged). Once you got tagged (or tackled), you became one of the defenders. Last person running won.

We had to play this in gym class in elementary school.

Yeah, bulldog and dodge ball both. I find it interesting that the really shudder-inducingly brutal games were the ones the gym teachers imposed on us, not the ones that we kids came up with ourselves.

See, at my parochial school in the early '60s, there was no gym class. We played dodge ball and British bulldog because we liked them. No one was forced to play.

My childhood years involved a lot of ranging around the neighborhood -- okay, 3-4 houses' back yards and a patch of woods; we lived on a busy street -- and thinking we were wild creatures, when really, there was a stay at home mom in at least one of the houses, and I'm sure she kept more of an eye on us than I realized at the time.

We were on a busy road, too, but we were everywhere. We had the advantage of having a not-very-much-used national park in close proximity, so we'd just bid the parentals adieu and hike the three miles up the road to the Revolutionary War encampments.

I have a teeny suspicion that Monty Python was taking the piss.

No!

That's different-- ours depended on jumping on the elastic with your feet: two people would put the elastic round them (again, starting with ankles and moving up), and you had to land on it in specific patterns, saying the silly rhyme to help you remember what you where doing.

We did that, too. Ours was In, Out, Side, Side, Step, In, Out. The first round was around the ankles, then the second was knees, then hips, waist, armpits, and eventually neck. (No, we didn't realize at the time how incredibly stupid neck was. No one was ever able to actually do that one, anyway. One girl, who later became a professional ballet dancer, was able to jump into the loop, but then she couldn't get any farther than that.)

When I was a kid in the 70s, four of us used to hang out and play the most outrageous games. I can't imagine many -- if any -- kids would be allowed to play the way we did, or would even want to play the made up games we played.

One game was simply called, "guns". Sometimes we'd use a stick to represent a rifle but more often we'd just use our finger -- we never bothered with toy guns. The whole purpose of the game was to "kill" each other and put on the most spectacular "death". Hong Kong action movies were more spectaculor than us ... but only just. Surprisingly, there were never any broken bones, even when falling from the garage roof became popular.

Another game was "branch jumping". One friend had this huge pine tree in his backyard. At the top was wood platform and from there we'd launch ourselves in a race to see who could get to the bottom first. We were eventually stopped from playing that when Chris -- who's backyard had the tree -- fell 15 feet and broke his arm.

The 3rd game we played was "fence walking". It mostly involved crawling but essentially, we'd set off along the top beam of the back fence and see how far we could get before a home-owner chased us out of their yard. For the most part it wasn't that dangerous, though hazards could be found in the form of the sharp edges of corrugated iron sections of fence, or vicious dogs lying in wait for a happy meal on legs. This game could only be played at one of the other chaps' houses b/c there were no houses adjoing my parents' house.

I grew up with "the plantation" behind my house. Essentially, this was a long stretch of wooded land, that seperated the train line and open storm-water drain, from the houses. My friends and I, used to disappear for hours into that wonderland. We'd play cricket in an open section just near my house, or we'd take off exploring. What is now a 10 minute walk for adult-me, used to be an afternoon's journey for kid-me and ended up behind the Central Districts football oval. Sometimes we'd do "drain running", which involved heading along the narrow section of the storm-water drain by running a few steps along one 45 degree wall, then hopping to the other side for a few steps and so forth. Eventually, you'd end up near the Elizabeth South train station and the storm-water tunnel. This tunnel only runs about 150 metres but in the middle section it is pitch dark, so getting through it without any light, was a major achievement.

Not surprisingly, kids don't play in the "plannie" any more. Instead, their parents seem to think it is much safer for them to play on the road. They're probably right but it is a sad state of affairs.

My favourite game was "slide down a rope between 2 trees on a pulley". Which became "slide down a rope between 2 trees on a pulley and kick a 10-foot-high corrugated iron drum out of the way" and finally "slide down a rope between 2 trees on a pulley and kick a 10-foot-high corrugated iron drum out of the way while spinning round and round" at which point one of us bruised the base of his spine, fell 10 feet to the floor, broke his arm and concussed himself on the corrugated iron drum. For some reason Henry's mum took the pullety away after that - spoilsport. So we put one of us in the drum and beat it with cricket bats as it roled acros their tennis court - which I believe is a popular method of torture in Burma...

apropos to the good bad US accent debate.

I’ve noticed that one of the biggest differences is that actual words and how they are used. You can have a perfect British accent and still sound like an American doing a bad impression because the word usage is wrong and vice vera. The hardest thing for me posting here is to take the words I know how to use and rearrange them, srunch some up, stretch other bits out and generally throw the whole bunch up into the air and hope that by the time they land they’ll have magically reordered themselves from English to American so that folks can understand what I’m getting at.

While simultaneously editing out the traditional Scots swearing that would normally make my speech interesting and colourful :-P IJS

The paranoia definitely exists here, at least out in suburbia. You don't see kids playing baseball anymore unless they're wearing uniforms. I have had arguments about it with the wife of one of my best friends. She is adamant about not letting her kids out unsupervised.

I long for those carefree Enid Blyton days when parents would send their kids out to play and not let them back in til supper. *sigh* aaah the golden era, we had grass back then. t remembers green things

Did other people play Elastics?

Ooh yes. and skipping with long ropes, tag, queeny queeny,

Another game was "branch jumping". One friend had this huge pine tree in his backyard. At the top was wood platform and from there we'd launch ourselves in a race to see who could get to the bottom first. We were eventually stopped from playing that when Chris -- who's backyard had the tree -- fell 15 feet and broke his arm.

Branch jumping sounds fun. We had a rope swing over a quarry pit that had been all grown over withe trees and stuff. I stopped playing there when I fell must have been about 15 feet aswell and landed on my back. I was lucky, Steven, my ½ brother fell of a while later and took a huge gash out of his side. The adults took the swing down after that.

A few of my friends and I used to pretend we had a TV network, and we'd make up shows for it, with each show based in someone else's back yard. One friend had a swingset with a rope and a rope ladder and one of those things you walk across with your hands, so in her yard we had a Jungle Explorers show, where we'd pretend to be going through a jungle somewhere and telling people about the different animals. Then we'd usually get attacked by something and get killed, with spectacularly over-dramatic death scenes.

In another friend's yard, we'd have a news show, with one person as the reporter, and the rest of us acting out a war in the background. Sometimes someone would play Saddam Hussein and the rest of us would attack her. The trick was for everyone to pay attention to everyone else, so that the reporter would keep reporting without turning around to look at the rest of us, and she had to keep up with what we were doing, and we had to listen to what she was saying, so that she had to report everything that we were doing, and we had to do everything that she said we did.

Hil R that sounds like an ideal game for comedy improv.