Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

Perfect summer days. Can't complain about the weather. However, some people do. 'It's too hot.” Later in the year they'll be whinging that it's too cold. You just can't please some people.

The RR clan has been making the best of the amazing weekends; and grannie and gramps finally got our hands on the grandies for a weekend.

It's not easy these days, them growing up so fast and getting all busy with sport and all of the other stuff that the younger generation does. Probably MSMing or twerking or LOLing or some other stuff in another language. Darn, I'm starting to sound like my grandparents.

Anyway, some of the RR research team, out on a piscatorial survey expedition this week, got to talking about the younger generation and how they are missing out on some of the basic adventures of life. Probably the same discussion that has happened for generations of millennia, right back to the cave man days.

I can imagine the conversation that went on between Ug and Ga.

Ug: 'Little Toogah just doesn't know how lucky he his, having a club to hunt mammoths with. In our day, we didn't have that new-fangled stuff; we had to do it with our bare hands.”

Ga: 'Yeah, or a rock. And what sort of a name is Toogah? In our day, we had monosyllable names. Now they're getting all fancy. Next thing you know, they'll be putting hyphens in their surnames.”

Ug: 'When did we get surnames. Why would we need those?”

Ga: 'You need them to sign into Facerock, stupid.”

Anyway, the conversation drifted onto kids adventuring and the fun we'd had with the grandies; mucking around in boats, messing in the garden and doing fun yard stuff like cleaning the gutters, trimming the hedge and putting stuff in places that will annoy Granny.

One of the RR team pointed out that kids don't get to do as much falling out of trees, skinning knees and just marauding out into the wild and getting dirty.

Just this week, a story made national headlines when a young fella, out with his granddad on the farm, got bitten on the foot by an eel. They took him home, patched him up, then went out prepared with hooks and gaffs. Caught the eels, took them home, smoked them and ate them. The perfect revenge. Now this used to be a daily occurrence around the nation, probably still happens with daily monotony on farms; yet these days, it rates as a news story!

Are our kids so sheltered that the moment one has a small adventure down the back of the farm its headline news?

Uncle T piped up from the corner, saying these days you couldn't, for instance, set fire to your scout master's tent and get away with it.

Which of course raised the question, did you set fire to your scout master's tent, Uncle T?

'Yes, and got thrown of the scouts. The old man was not very happy when he heard that.

'We were just mucking around with the fire and decided to see if the guy ropes would melt. How were we to know the flames would race up the guy ropes and ignite the whole canvas tent?”

'Kids just don't do stuff like that anymore.”

Uncle T (front row, second from left) before that ‘incident' at the camp site.

Now some quick background checks among the rest of the team revealed that setting fire to the scout master's tent wasn't actually in the repertoire of any other of the RR team in attendance on this particular day. But we agreed, yes, it rated as a particularly impressive act of juvenile delinquency that would, in this day and age, probably result in a youth court appearance, pyromaniac-avoidance counselling and compulsory attendance at a fire prevention safety course.

Anyway it was a great weekend, doing fun stuff around the house, in the backyard and down the beach with the grandchildren, who are part of a generation that have such structured pastimes filling their lives, there's not a lot of time left for galahing around with misguided aging troublemakers. Probably just as well.

There's too few scoutmasters now, we wouldn't want to lose any more.