Having children is an expensive business and makes distant memories of lie-ins, two minutes of peace and quiet, and spontaneous nights out.
On the plus side, you have the perfect excuse to revisit toys from your youth. For the kids' sake, obviously.
When I were a lad, there was a room that we all referred to rather grandly as ‘the study’. In truth, it was the basement, and is where my Dad still keeps his enormous collection of Autosport and Motor Sport magazines. Some of the latter are pre-war or even wartime issues.
For a while, though, it was also my Scalextric room.
The sections of track were mostly ones from Dad’s youth, so they were already more than 20-years old. There was a ritual before each game: make sure that the connections at the end of every piece weren’t about to fall off (or hadn’t just done so) and wire-brush the most sorry-looking sections.
And that was just the track. The cars were a little past their best, too, so their wire contacts had to be massaged back into shape to coax a little more life out of them.
Even after all that, there would inevitably be a ‘dead’ section at which the cars would just stop.
The more I played, the more gleaming new sections were added, until I could create passable versions of the great race tracks of old. Not even Brooklands was out of the question, thanks to small green blocks that created banked corners.
