THE SEVEN SEAS OF PLAY

Moonbase Junior loves pirates. 

They just have that wow factor - or gar factor! He got a really well-done tattoo whilst we were in Whitby on holiday: a pirate's head, hat, skull, crossbones and all. Temporary I might add. It lasted 7 days like the seas.

This tattoo joined his other paraphanalia, a tattered flag, a little lego pirate which he called Little Captain and a plastic galleon.

Add a little imagination and pirates can come alive everywhere: the settee, the bathroom and the garden. We must have chased each other round the holiday house every day shouting Gar! and Shiver Me Timbers! through every room! apart from where his baby sister was sleeping.

This spontaneous piracy seems to have tapped into my own latent like of salty sea dogs. I recall as a kid the ubiquity of them on book covers, in stories, on the telly and of course pirate toys.

Long John Silver, Treasure Island, Blackbeard, Redbeard, Yo Ho Ho Rum, desert islands, gangplanks, sharks, treasure chests, gold, peg leg, hooks, gold teeth, flowing coats and big boots and wide belts stuffed with flintlocks. Ah, the smell of gun powder in the morning as the sun rises beyond the reef!

Yep, pirates are still cool and even, dare I say it, safe. Moonbase Junior is just shy of four and hasn't been introduced to toy guns yet so his piracy is gun-free. It doesn't seem to bother him and I don't think he even knows. He does have a plastic cutlass but swordplay isn't a big draw for him either. 

The iconography of pirates is strong enough to work for kids without all the weaponry these days. Pirates have been made safe and as a result can be found everywhere now.

I would say that they have completely overtaken cowboys and indians, which as a kids' sub-culture, has waned to the point of vanishing. When I was a kid we even sang Who Wants to Play at Cowboys and Indians, No Girls Aloud across the playground. The play itself centred entirely on guns, bows and arrows, shooting noises, brave whooping, dying, counting to ten and lots of running round.

I haven't seen Cowboys and Indians being played for decades and I imagine various cultural factors have seen to its gloss rapidly wearing off. As kids' icons they just haven't been made safe either like pirates and as such cowboys and indians are disappearing from play. I certainly haven't played it with Junior.

And so we have pirates. And dinosaurs. And aliens and lots of other communities we had as kids ourselves, which keep today's kids happy too.

Have you any thoughts on the rise of the pirate readers? Were they important to you as children?