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“While chatting with my teenage grandchildren, I discovered that they haven’t been taught to write script – what we called ‘running writing’ when I was a kid,” laments Gary Nicholson of Carlingford. “They can only print. Can any Column 8-ers involved in education tell me if this is a general development and when and why it began?”
“Meccano (C8) lives!” declares 80-year-old Dave Pyett of Maroubra. “I still have most of my set, sadly unplayed with for a while, in my old garage, which is actually collapsing around the Meccano set and an old Rover, also in pieces. I’ll get around to it one day. Meanwhile, I can play with the Meccano steam engine which lives on my desk. I just have to be careful not to set said desk on fire.” Time to invest in a Meccano fire engine kit.
“As a 70-year-old, I still have my father’s boxed set,” reveals Karen Hobson of Hurstville. “Even as a girl I enjoyed constructing, with his help, as did my sons.”
Alan Finlay of Camperdown got fully into it: “I have fond memories of my Meccano set (Number 6) and my Meccano gears option set. I used them to construct a driving simulator with three-speed gearbox in addition to the usual cranes and tractors.”
The plight of Nola Tucker’s husband and the gifting of his set has triggered empathy from the readership: “Nola, I feel your husband’s pain,” says Peter Singer of Hamilton South. “Years ago my wife, fearing my impending doom, pressured me to sell my precious motorbike. The money was used to buy laminate floorboards. For years after that, whenever we drove past a motorbike, the kids would yell, ‘there go the floorboards, Dad’.”
“I was a psychiatric nurse at Gladesville Hospital in the ’70s,” writes Rosemary Wolf of Mount Warrigal. “The bread was supplied by the gaols and was wrapped in wax paper (C8), pink for brown bread, white for white bread. It was good bread too. I also used greaseproof paper for dress patterns.”
Malcolm Johnson of Alstonville has a new use for old nappies (C8): “During the 1970s and ’80s as a member of RFS, I used my children’s old cloth nappies (sanitised and folded) as a neckerchief smoke mask because there was nothing else to use. After 40 years, I still have one in my kit. No sign of lung cancer, so they must’ve worked.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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