Sheffield history: Boredom is a luxury - and something I didn't make the most of growing up in the 1970s

There wasn’t much TV, no internet, no consoles or much else to do in our 1970s Sheffield home, so I thought I had an excuse, until I heard a quote stating, “Only a boring man gets bored”.

It seemed to make sense so never again would I admit to, or be bored.

As a child we only had two of the three available TV channels, BBC1, 2 and ITV.

In the 1970s TV was still in relative infancy, with none of the programmes we take for granted today.

TV didn’t start much before 12pm and finished well before 12am during the week and around midnight at the weekend, if I was lucky enough not to get sent to bed by my dad before listening to the national anthem – any excuse to stay up a little longer.

Dad was a saving grace really. On late nights they would normally show horror films in black and white – or so I assumed as we had a black and white TV.

A werewolf, Dracula or Frankenstein film – they were all a little tame by today's standards, but enough to scare me. Why I tried to stay up I’ll never know.

I learned early not to moan to my mum, this could end in her finding me something to do such as tidy my room, or should I say our room – kids in the 70s rarely had a room to themselves and I shared my room with my two brothers.

My mum is a great believer in education. She also liked textbooks and encyclopaedias – we had numerous of both and she would always point me in the direction of one of them on occasions when I couldn’t play out because rain stopped play.

With limited TV, textbooks and encyclopaedias were my entertainment.

I would skim the pages looking at whatever grabbed my fancy. Identifying flags was one of my favourite past times.

I was pretty good back then. The changes in the world have brought a whole range of new flags, a lot more now, than when I was memorising them.

While my friends were reading Dandy, Beano, or Victor comics, I was learning that the blue whale is the largest animal ever, that the cheetah is the fastest land animal or, my favourite, that the Peregrine Falcon is the fastest animal in the world diving up to 180mph.

Today, with hundreds of TV channels and all the internet can provide along with numerous console games, people still find time to be bored.

People seem to live at such a fast pace you wouldn’t think tghey’d be able to be bored.

Everything has to be instantaneous, we can’t wait for anything.

I’ve now realised that boredom or the lack of something to do is a luxury; we should feel lucky to have time and space.

The boring Sundays I hated are the times, if we are lucky enough, that should be spent with friends and family. Catching up, not spent on our tablets or devices – those are the times you’ll never get back.