In which my friend and I delve into our childhood....

I cannot begin to tell you how much rain has fallen in the past 24-48 hours, and how much damage the wind has done to my garden. Pots blown over, plants horizontal. Oh well. It will revive itself. I can help. 

 And I have managed 2 more aqua classes, and then, a lovely surprise visit from an old school friend from eons ago. We last saw each other in 1987. June remembered. But it seemed like yesterday, and the conversation has roared along all day, ever since she bounded out of the station. (She is agile and bounds along. I feel like Methuselah.)

 See? i complained about having my photo taken while she was sitting down and i was standing - never a good look, believe me - so she leapt onto the rocking chair and took some from on high. Much better, thankyouverymuch.

 While discussing games and toys of our youth ,  (she remembered stencils - they were a winner) I showed her how to take self portraits. Well. There was MUCH laughter.

 We could have been 17 again. It was good growing up with lovely friends who have stood the test of time with ease.

 See - I made her climb onto a chair in the garden too. In the rain.

 This photos of a cosmos is for Marge. See, Marge? It is not right. It looks like a mutant and I am not pleased. So we will go back to the old ones again next year. I am SO tempted to yank these ones out. I do not want little tubes instead of open petals. I tried cutting them and they expired.

But my sunflower is reaching for the skies. One of them. The other 2 are catching up fast.

So here is a question - I asked vaguely, I think, in a previous post. What games or toys did YOU play with as a child?

• Hopscotch (with a variation of 6 squares, and a caller who yelled out "boys names, Countries"etc, and you had to name 6 as you hopped. Matthew, Mark, Luke John, Peter, Paul.......)
• Paper dolls
• Colouring books
• Barbie and Skipper
• Floppy dolls
• Jacks
• Card games
• Drawing, stencils, crayons, etc
• Goomie (french skipping) - a card of elastic tied in a knot and looped around 2 people's legs while you leap in and out and twist about)
• I wrote a letter to my love
• Cat's cradle
• tennisette
• Diving for stones at the bottom of the pool
• Catch (or on-on)
• Hide and seek
• Collecting charms
• Books and more books
• Monopoly
• The forerunner to pictionary - a couple of teams and someone with a list of movies or books, and having to draw them without speaking
• That paper game where you have the alphabet drawn in little circles on one page and then pages of columns where you list country, boys name, rivers, mountains, food, vegetables, fruit etc etc - choose the topic - and then take turns closing your eyes and stabbing the alphabet page with a pencil, and then the race is on to complete a line with original things starting with the letter chosen
• tin can telephones (+ a piece of string)
• "Clubs" - I had a club with my next door neighbour, and we used to meet in the little old wendy house in her garden, which contained cushions, and piles of annuals (Christmas editions of the comics we loved to read in book form) - Mandy, Bunty, June, Princess, Judy, Look and Learn.. We also had passwords, and no-one could crawl in without knowing the password. 

There are more. You know, the one thing that struck me, and I want to go back to this point in the future, is that the toys / games we played with all required input from us. Lots of outdoor fun, and lots of imagination. They were tools. In themselves, apart for the books, they were not entertainment. And most of them did not cost much, if anything at all. In retrospect, who could have known that hopscotch could improve one's general knowledge? Rivers? Countries? Like that paper game. 

And today, children are more sedentary, and so much of what they get to play with is entertainment rather than imaginative. TV inspired. Instant. It makes you think doesn't it??????