Kids are lacking the write stuff
Carlingford’s Gary Nicholson laments: “Chatting to my young grandchildren, I discovered they weren’t taught how to write screenplays; when I was a kid we called it ‘keep writing’.” “They can only print it out. Can those at Pillar 8, who deal with education, tell me if this is a general development, when it started and why?”
“Meccano (C8) is alive!” Says 80-year-old Dave Pyett of Maroubra. “Most of my set is still sadly unplayed for a while, sitting in my old garage which is about to fall apart around the Meccano set and an old Rover. I’ll get started on that one day. In the meantime, I can play with the Meccano steam engine that lives on my table. I just have to be careful not to set said table on fire.” It’s time to invest in a Meccano fire truck kit.
“As a 70-year-old, I still have my dad’s boxed set,” says Karen Hobson of Hurstville. “Even as a girl, I enjoyed building with his help, as did my sons.”
Camperdown’s Alan Finlay totally got it: “I have very fond memories of my Meccano set (Number 6) and my Meccano gear option set. I used them to create a driving simulator with a three-speed gearbox in addition to the usual winches and tractors.”
Nola Tucker’s husband’s plight and the gift of his set prompted reader empathy: “Nola, I feel your husband’s pain,” says Hamilton South’s Peter Singer. “Many years ago, my wife, fearing my impending doom, had pressured me to sell my precious motorcycle. The money was used to buy laminate floorboards. In the years since, whenever we passed a motorcycle, the children would shout, ‘here go the floorboards, dad’.”
“I was a psychiatric nurse at Gladesville Hospital in the 70s,” writes Rosemary Wolf of Mount Warrigal. “The bread was sourced from prisons and wrapped in greaseproof paper (C8); pink for brown bread and white for white bread. It was also a beautiful bread. I also used greaseproof paper for dress patterns.”
Malcolm Johnson of Alstonville has a new use for old diapers (C8): “As an RFS member in the 1970s and ’80s, I used my children’s old cloth diapers (sterilized and folded) as scarf smoke masks because there was nothing else to use. I still have one in my bag 40 years later. No signs of lung cancer, so they must have worked.”
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