SCHOOL’S out for summer. Well, almost. And no doubt kids everywhere are busy plotting how they’ll be spending their hazy, lazy, crazy days away from the classroom. Or rather, expecting their mums to.

For unless it’s driven off a computer, features inanities on Facebook that are boring to everyone else unless you’re the one writing them, or focuses on your Call Of Duty, it appears that kids today don’t really put themselves out to create their own school holiday entertainment.

Unlike when I were a lass. From breakfast time to teatime we were never in. Every sun-glistened morning (because the sun always shone when you were a kid, didn’t it?) out of the back door we’d bowl, weighted down by three Weetabix to keep up our energy levels and dive deep into the realms of our self created summer play scheme.

Not for us pre-arranged activities at the local swimming pool, playing field, or park. Or ‘play dates’ with the nerdy kid from school you spent all term avoiding. No – we didn’t need our parents to arrange our social lives for us or drive us to the latest organised attraction. We managed to knock on our friends’ doors all by ourselves.

With nothing more than our imaginations as a play prop we’d spend hours pretending to be horses (don’t ask – it was a girl thing and consequently I was never very good at it, being something of a tomboy, much to my mother’s frequent despair).

Or we’d while away whole afternoons playing Pooh sticks and when we tired of that we’d pick daisies out of the local cricket pitch – it wasn’t a very good one – and make what seemed to be mile-long daisy chains.

One time – and yes, it was just the once – we held an uneasy ceasefire with the local lads and created a town out of the dirt on the grass verge outside my nana’s house, building roadways out of the soil so we could run our Dinky and Corgi cars along them to our hearts’ content.

I had my own collection, my most coveted example being a James Bond Aston Martin with a pop-up rear bullet shield, guns that popped out of the radiator and a 007 ejector seat. I got thumped by my brother when he found out I’d pinched it to impress the lads for yes, ’twas his, but I digress.

The ceasefire rapidly ended though when this stupid girl introduced her Sindy doll and tried to get it to prance down our little town’s main street, which didn’t go down at all well. I must say I was with the boys on that one.

When I was seven or eight we lived opposite a building site, and thought nothing of shinning up scaffolding poles and thundering along narrow planks of wood set at roof height playing tig (or did you call it tag?).

We’d leap yawning gaps where the planks had mysteriously disappeared, grabbing upright poles as we went, diving through window frames and balancing on rafters such was our urgency to get away from whoever was It.

One day I missed my footing, fell 20 feet into a pile of sand and got up and ran off. Such bounce-ability! Such lack of fear! Because, yes, we had no sense of fear whatsoever (except of bogies when you were lying in bed at night), and it didn’t enter our heads that what we were doing was remarkably stupid and undoubtedly dangerous.

Another time we targeted a huge pile of bricks and with the precision of engineers cleared an entrance into the heart of it, removing bricks one at a time so that eventually we’d created a secret den and could crawl inside, making ourselves completely invisible to the outside world.

Not for a moment did it cross our minds that just one foot kicked out in the wrong direction or one jostle of an elbow as we tunnelled our way in and the whole lot could have caved in and crushed us, probably to death.

The health and safety Taliban would have had a fit. Well, today’s lot would. Actually, to this day my mum doesn’t know about the dafter antics we used to get up to and when she reads this she’ll probably have a fit as well.

But we had no sense of danger, no notions about our mortality or potential closeness to it. We just wanted to play and hang the consequences. But now, as a parent, I see things differently. So to all kids everywhere, keep safe and have a great summer.