Bloganuary Day 4 – hanging in there

What was your favourite toy as a child?

Although I was obviously too young to remember, apparently my favourite toy when I was just a baby was a teddy bear called ‘Growly’*, so named because if you squeezed his belly he….well, growled.

At least he did until I was sick all over him.

(* Given my general demeanour as an adult, this may be an early example of second-degree nominative determinism.)

I was a serious and quite introverted child, much more likely to have my nose in a book than doing anything as frivolous as playing and being generally childlike. However, my most abiding memory as regards childhood toys is of a quite large set of multi-coloured wooden building blocks. None of that Lego nonsense back in those days.

‘Very good’, you may be thinking. Surely such a plaything must have proved beneficial in terms of developing creativity and problem-solving skills. Well it probably did, but I am still occasionally troubled by the memory of what I tended to do with these blocks.

Yes, I constructed quite large and elaborate buildings with them, which I usually thought of as forts. Almost always, however, I would have a few blocks left over. These tended to be the cylindrical ones, as my construction skills did not extend to being able to insert round plugs into square holes.

So what to do with the left-overs? This is where it gets a bit dark. Having built the fort I would then reduce it to rubble by bombing it with the left over cylinders. And repeat.

Over to you, Professor Freud.