The weird thing about getting older is that time passes quicker. It has nothing to do with Einstein and the speed of light - it just happens.

Look at a period of six weeks. It's nothing, these days - a blink, a short gap between the first bill and the snotty final reminder.

But look back to when six weeks made up the school summer holidays. It wasn't eternity to us, but it was as near as made no difference.

There was no limit to what you could do in six weeks - circumnavigate the globe, conquer Everest, manage to get two gobstoppers in your mouth at once.

We could even have solved the mystery of the double frogs.

Unlike today's younger end, a lot of whom are technological prisoners in a world filled with menace, we were actually allowed to get out and about during the holidays, and if our parents worried a bit if we were late back, they weren't actually having hysterics and ringing the SAS.

No, the world was our oyster - or at least a small bit of it was. We had every Bradford kid's heritage - abundant fresh air and open space within a short walk (and if you think this is no big deal, try living in London, or Birmingham, or quite a lot of other big cities)

We had the park, the woods (complete with stream) and the bit by the golf course which contained an old dam. You couldn't ask for more.

There was even a flat field above the woods which doubled as Headingley during the cricket season; and the nearby allotments had plenty of standpipes if you got thirsty (and dared face the wrath of allotment holders).

It was in these Elysian fields that we absorbed the folklore of our ancestors:

If you touched a dandelion, you would wet the bed.

If you even thought about picking cow parsley, your mother would died inexplicably.

Absolutely everything that grew on a tree or a bush was deadly poisonous.

Absolutely everything with six legs had a venomous bite.

No gang of lads was complete without at least one member who had spent the night in hospital for observation after eating laburnum seeds under the mistaken impression they were peas.

The last of these was, admittedly, pretty dim. In those days most of us knew what peas looked like when they were growing, and knew they did not spontaneously generate in the deep freeze in the supermarket. We didn't actually know what a deep freeze was, and there weren't any supermarkets, so there was no excuse for such ignorance.

It was all Spud's fault. He had been the one in hospital after overdosing on laburnum and he reckoned he had a pretty good time while lying in bed, resolutely not displaying any symptoms of poisoning, watching television (a rare treat) and eating everybody else's meals.

This sounded pretty good, so much so that Robbo took up the challenge, swallowed half a dozen seeds and spent three days at home, miles from a television, at death's door, throwing up, squittering, and vowing never to eat anything again.

Spud, on the other hand, could eat anything.

What he couldn't ingest was information of any sort. It wasn't that he was stupid or that there was anything wrong with his senses. He could hear a crisp packet at half a mile, smell a Pontefract cake at three and spot an ice cream van better than the Hubble Space Telescope.

He just didn't learn too quickly.

So when he came across the double frogs, he got quite excited.

'Ey look' he said. 'There's two frogs here stuck together'.

We were leaning over the dam peering into the shallows. Spring was in the air, the buds were on the trees and nature's imperative was working on the frogs.

Spud spotted several more and started bubbling with excitement and hay-fever. Double frogs! They were probably mutations caused by atom bomb testing, he reasoned.

If we could catch half a dozen, we could put them on show and charge admission. We could get rich. Visions of buying a sweet-shop vied with the idea of actually owning a chip shop in his fevered brain.

Then Tonto, who was a bit older and wise beyond his years, took Spud aside and explained that the double frogs were actually aspiring mummy and daddy frogs who were busy making spawn for our annual tadpole hunt.

Spud, who had seen the Mackintosh's factory in Halifax from a train once, and was by now thinking up putting in a bid for it, looked stricken.

The wonders of nature were, for our budding Barnum, as nothing against the prospect of an endless tube of Rolos.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.