Every boys dream toy when I was a kid was Scalextric, slot car racing. I had this set but I cant find a picture of the cars yet. I had this one sometime around about 75-76 I think. I had one blue car and one red, as on the box. It came with this scale speed calculator thing that was my first experience of "Mind Fuck"Anyway...with this set you could have a "figure of 8" or standard "oval" layout, complete with high speed banking which apparently made it marginally easier to keeop the cars on while going around corners. I still recall spending most of the time fetching the cars from under the sofa.
I later expanded my set by buying some extra track from Grimwades, a second hand shop in the Canton area of Cardiff. I bought extra straights, including a chicane and some barrier pieces which didn't really help keep the cars on but made the crashes a little more spectacular. After months of mindless "figure of 8ing"(funny how you could do repetitive stuff without losing your temper in those childhood days) I found that if you fixed all the straights together in one long line you could 'shoot' the cars off the end at the front room wall, the first stages of teenage rebellion??
Well the one thing that stands out the most is that the same Christmas that I got this, my sister got Simon and Garfunkels "Brudge Over Troubled Water" and I always hung around for Baby Driver to come on the Stereogram so I could wind the cars up along with the race car rev sound at the end of the track....sad???...Fuck I was only a kid!
No comments:
Post a Comment