"Good game!" exclaimed Bruce Forsyth. And he was right. Games were good. Before drugs and video came along to keep the kids happy, if you wanted to have fun, you had to earn the right, spending ages memorising the instructions to interminable board games, or running round with toy machine guns yelling, "Dead!!" Cards were popular as well. The only people who play cards nowadays are students, hankering after a childhood they don't actually seem to have left behind ...But we were no technological retards either. 'Pocketeers' was the miracle of the hour: miniaturised, clockwork or spring-driven devices that mimicked the characteristics of grander board games or amusement arcade machines in a package about the size of a Galaxy, with sometimes equally addictive results....The tiny one-armed bandits I could take or leave, likewise the magnetised Formula One race-track, but my favourite waste of time was a silver ball bearing you had to dribble through a plastic maze while a twenty second clockwork motor slowly ran down. Magic!
As for playground pastimes, traditional games like conkers were being eclipsed by a new generation of alternatively patterned and coloured marbles, up for competitive grabs for those prepared to crouch over drain-hole covers at breaktimes, numbing their fingers flicking them into saucer-shaped handle grips. On the sporting field, cricket was dull, dangerous and dauntingly supervised by fanatical teachers, but back home, a ping-pong bat propped against a front door, protecting an encyclopedia 'wicket' might offer hours of distraction as you sped down the hall to unload your spinning sphere. Weekends disappeared in a frenzy of kicking a ball against the wall of the garage, then I'd dribble a circular object around the carpet and 'Kung Fu' scraps of paper 'til collapsing in front of the telly to watch,'The Water Margin'. Sometimes darts came into fashion. '77 was a good year I remember. I was having a session with Terry when The Sex Pistols came on the radio:
"The country's in a right bleeding state," said one. "What can you do about it?" asked the interviewer. "Make it worse," The Pistol replied. Perfect. What was the point in throwing darts or indulging in marathon ball dribbles when someone could target your anger in three seconds flat? Away went the dartboard once more.
No comments:
Post a Comment