Of course we had Lego as children. Didn't everybody? Brightly-coloured, interlocking plastic bricks that could be formed into any kind of toy imaginable. Lego, possibly Denmark's most famous product.
But before we* had Lego we had Betta Bilda, a very similar product made by Airfix. The bricks were smaller, all white and didn't lock together as well as Lego - though they were made of very sturdy plastic. To build a roof for a house there were small green tiles that were incredibly awkward to put together. There were door frames and window frames with little pieces of transparent plastic that had to be fitted into the window frames and little plastic doors that fit into the door frames. In short you built a house in the same way that you might build a real one.
Of course, in those days, when you bought a box of bricks, of whichever type, you got rather a lot of them. Nowadays when I glance on the toy shop windows I see that if you buy Lego you buy enough to make one specific model - often a model that has been licensed from a film - and that's all you buy. I daresay you can still buy general sets but I haven't seen them around.
And I haven't seen Betta Bilda for years. I don't know if it even exists any more. Lego was probably the superior product but nostalgia isn't about what was best, it's about what you remember best and I remember that Betta Bilda set with pieces small enough to choke a child that were fiddly enough to be next to impossible for uncoordinated childish fingers.
Sometimes I wonder where all the these things that I get misty-eyed over went. They must have been lost or given away or thrown away as we grew up but I don't recall anything ever having been thrown away. I suppose that they were abandoned and forgotten and then quietly disposed of by parents who wanted a home less cluttered by things no longer used. It's a pity really that our pasts are so disposable.
(*That is to say, specifically, before my brother and I had Lego. I don't know which was actually the earlier product. I suspect it was probably Lego.)
1 comment:
You know, come to think of it, I haven't seen any general sets of blocks for Lego, either. It's always the pricey models. Although, in our house, once the original model was built it was usually unbuilt and reconfigured or just added to the enormous collection of Lego blocks to be used for whatever creative thing he thought of next. Also, those models really taught him a lot about following directions and spatial concepts. . . at least, that is was i told myself as I melted down my credit card.
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