Oh how I loved table tennis! Gramps took out English lottery tickets for Jo and I and one day, I won £ 200. There was no question how to spend the money. We promptly got a wonderful table tennis table that allowed one to raise the one side up so you could play against yourself. We put the table in the outside room and I spent many happy hours playing myself and others. To this day, I still play table tennis whenever I get the opportunity.
Hours and hours of fun staging battles between opposing forces. I threw matchstick boxes to emulate artillery!
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I had several action men as a kid but my favourite was the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Many hours were spent playing with them. One of the reasons they delighted me so much was my love of westerns as a kid including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and western movies we watched at Eight Bells. I especially loved western movies that featured Indians.
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Apart from my model trains, my favourite thing to play with was lego. Jo and I spent countless hours building things. It was pure bliss.
I had lots of furry toys as a kid including several dogs, a bear, a rabbit and bambi. But my favourite was my two labrador puppies. How I loved them. They slept on my bed throughout my childhood.
I addition to stamp collecting, my greatest passion as a kid was to play with my electric model trains. I spent countless hours in the outside room at our house in Bertram Crescent, making them run. My model trains were one of the things that deepened my connection with dad. He was as passionate about trains as I was.
I've just spent a wonderful hour trawling the Internet for photos for some of the exact trains I owned. Pure and utter, glorious nostalgia.
I brought my train collection with me to Sydney but a couple of years ago, I gave them to Andreas's son, Sebastian. They really are meant to be played with rather than collecting dust. He was so ecstatic.
I loved my Commodore 64. I used it for computer games and for programming a simple game. This was my first passion project. Unfortunately I lost the code to the game and was so despondent, I gave up programming. A pity because I think I would have been well suited to it.
Another of my favourite things to do as a child was to play computer games. I spent many hours doing this, first with our Atari Consul and then my Commodore 64 computer.
