Construction Zone Ahead

So admittedly the room could smell a bit sometime. But what could we do? We aired it, we cleaned it (when pushed). We tried to keep it clean, sort of. Sometimes things got a bit spread out on the floor, particularly small plastic blocks. Later Lego® took control of this type of toy, not that the blocks we had didn’t work. We could build anything with them. Admittedly we were a little focused on rockets and spaceships as were any children of that era, or castles and battles. We became very proficient at building with those. Designing impenetrable fortresses that could be staunchly defended by the variety of wooden and plastic figures we possessed. We didn’t have all the little specific lego® men as kids do today. Dressed in their very specific role defined uniforms and with their essentially specific tools and accessories. We made it up. A piece of attached string to represent a hose for supplying water/fuel or to act as a flame-thrower. Attaching a small block, with plasticine, to the figure, to be the backpack or oxygen supply. Our imaginations identified any sort of block, piece or item onto a figure to carry out our imaginations purpose. So we mixed and mingled our few figurines without any bias. We used the characters as they were, to work together. Not so much as a multi-cultural group but mixed in together to play whatever role we wanted them to. And they did. Without the flashing lights or batteries (or political correctness).

The floor could also contain the many small pieces of Meccano®, the genuine Meccano® that is. Original green, red and plain metal pieces and hundreds of very small nuts, washers, pins and bolts. My brother (2 years younger than me) and I, had been given this as a birthday present when we had lived in Castle Street, Dunedin, New Zealand (another house which is no longer there – more on that in a later blog.).

We were delighted. It was all second hand, but that was irrelevant at the time (more on that later too). It was the genuine Meccano® with which the world of conceptual engineering was opened to us. It was given to us in a big wooden half case. The nuts, bolts, pins and washers were separated off inside the wooden box, inside a couple of tins. There were many lengths of straight pieces with various holes, the small hole edged plates and base plates. It was wonderful and did entertain us for many hours. However, any construction site, requires many areas of items spread around to be able to start building. Therefore, areas of the floor needed to have some things lying on them and that included plates, lengths, wheels. They could not be kept in a box when trying to build with them. You needed to see to create. Well, when building we did some planning on paper as well, which meant that several sheets of paper (and the pens and such) would also be on the floor.

(continued tomorrow)