Fings ain’t wot they used ter be
This is my sixty-fifth Christmas and one thing I’ve noticed recently is that either my computer keyboard needs a new battery – that was my first assumption some eight months when I first noticed the phenomenon, since when I’ve changed the batteries twice – or my ability at two-fingered touch typing is diminishing because the frequency with which letters in words I type are transposing themselves (for example, I just typed ‘Chrsitmas’ instead of ‘Christmas’) is increasing, in which case my kids may be correct and my senile dementia is kicking in.
Thinking back over the past sixty years this morning, I suspect that my most memorable Christmas of all was that in the early Sixties when my brothers and I, unable to sleep on the night of Christmas Eve, sneaked down the stairs at our parents’ home to check on the dinner party that my parents were hosting.
We could hear whoops of excitement beyond the drawing room door but when we tried ever-so-secretly to turn the door-knob for some strange reason the door was locked.
Never mind that, the next morning, after we’d woken and risen to create mayhem open our Father Christmas stockings left upon the ends of our beds, that drawing room door was still locked. It was only after breakfast, and much badgering and questioning about it, that my father unlocked the door and in we dashed to find …
A Scalextrix (car racing) circuit set had been set up on the drawing room floor and the grown-ups had plainly had a field-day the previous evening, fuelled by liberal quantities of alcohol.
You may be able to imagine – or in my case recreate – the amazement and excitement that followed as we played with that set, which became an immediate family obsession (and thereafter for about the next five years) whenever we had the opportunity to gather together and do so.
Actually, make that about the next fifteen years. In our twenties, my brothers and I made full use of my parents’ house in Notting Hill Gate as a living quarters and a place to meet up and socialise. The now rather unsophisticated and battered Scalextrix set had found its way there and at weekends was laid out on that drawing room floor. I can remember that the track was basically an oval and that there was a bridge hump on one side of it, leading to a devilishly difficult hair-pin corner.
That distinctive aspect is relevant because by then we had devised our own version of a Scalextrix competition. It was way beyond the traditional one of two cars racing each other in a vaguely Formula One manner. Instead we each had teams of drivers competing in a series of Rollerball-type ‘do or die’ gladiatorial tournaments. The concept was very simple. Two cars took to the track, one from each individual’s team (not much change there, then). But the game involved a very real ‘cat and mouse’ scenario. The ‘race’ continued not for a set number of laps, but for as long as it took – be it a matters of seconds or ten minutes – until one or other of the cars knocked the other out of the groove by which it had tenuous connection with both the track and the source of electric power that drove it.
No words I could write would do justice to the level of excitement generated or indeed concentration required to manoeuvre the action to a position or place on the track where, for example, by accelerating suddenly as the cars neared a corner, the one behind could hit the back of the one in front at the right angle thereby to dislodge it. Or alternatively, suddenly stop in an instant, so that the car behind inadvertently crashed into the back of yours and thereby was itself driven off the track by the impact.
Needless to say, being sports nuts, we had soon devised different characters for each of our ‘drivers’ and a great body of individual statistics for them was built. Publications were written, previewing the next tournament and analysing the averages of each driver to try and choose those that were in form and would do well next time, or sadly charting the decline of a once-great former champion now clearly on the slide.
Each competition, all of them knock-out events, began with 32 entrants, going down to 16, 8, the semi-finals and of course the final, after which the new European or World Champion would be crowned.
Today I wish to salute the inventors of Scalextrix simply for the hours – no, months in total – of my life that I have been playing that toy, game, or whatever you call it. Does Scalextrix even still exist?
I pondered these things as I shaved this morning, wondering whether any modern young kid (and I don’t often come into contact with small children these days) is about to get something as mind-bogglingly wonderful as Scalextrix for his or her Christmas present.
My fear is that in 2016 (or 2017 if you’re looking forward) the average five-year-old kid is already an expert with so much technology – sending Twitter messages on his smartphone, ‘sexting’ his female class-mates at primary school, doing his internet betting on his iPad, and downloading movies from Netflix and Amazon – that no new toy or development can possibly create the sheer delight that Scalextrix did for me and my peers in 1963 or 1964.
Mind you, I’m probably just an old, past it, has-been fuddy-duddy, harking back to my youth.
Maybe in another sixty years’ time the average five year old today will be looking back with similar nostalgia upon his Samsung Galaxy 7 and whatever-is-the-fashionable toy of the moment in 2016.
The answer is probably yes he will, but somehow I don’t want it to be.
