James May, Action Man

Found this article on the Top Gear site, about the wonderful programme James May put together last Christmas: James May's Top Toys which has since been repeated at least once. Keep an eye out for a repeat this year.

"For several weeks now, I've been beavering away at my desk working on a project completely unrelated to Top Gear. I've been asked by the BBC to make Gear a one-hour Christmas special about toys, and I have to admit that I'm enjoying myself immensely. Toys are nostalgic, evocative and, above all, still great fun. Scalextric, for example, is really nothing more than an elaborate way of connecting the terminals of a 12-volt transformer to an electric motor.

If sir had pointed out that this phenomenon was the basis of all domestic motor racing, the physics lab would have been a happier place. Likewise the train set, which works in exactly the same way. I love a good train set, and a collection of Dinkies, a Mamod steam engine and a really big box of Meccano or Lego.

These things are magical and offer an immediate and welcome respite from the tedium of adulthood. The downside of all this, however, is that I'm reminded of some truly tedious toys that I'd rightly forgotten."

Aberfan

Ok, strange one this. I make this post because my mum reminded me yesterday that it was on the day of the Aberfan disaster - 21st October 1966 that Mum and Dad moved us from Pontypool to Cardiff, with myself a baby in a pram, and my four year old sister.

It's a shocking story - Aberfan, especially for those of us in Wales close to the event. My grandfather drove there on the day with blankets to help.

Please take some time to visit this site or one of the many others that cover the tragic story, and learn about the greed of the mine managers and the appalling attitude that the government has had to the victims of the Aberfan disaster ever since.

Aberfan: how it happened :-BBC animated graphic

Aberfan survivors 'still stressed'

Life magazine Aberfan display

In Pictures: Aberfan
Iconic image
How photo of child's rescue from 1966 disaster became its defining image

Aberfan mourns dead 40 years on

Reflecting on a lost generation

Rescuer revealed after 30 years

"At 9.15 am on Friday, October 21, 1966 a waste tip slid down a mountainside into the mining village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It first destroyed a farm cottage in its path, killing all the occupants. At Pantglas Junior School, just below, the children had just returned to their classes after singing All Things Bright and Beautiful at their assembly. It was sunny on the mountain but foggy in the village, with visibility about 50 yards. The tipping gang up the mountain had seen the slide start, but could not raise the alarm because their telephone cable had been repeatedly stolen. (The Tribunal of Inquiry later established that the disaster happened so quickly that a telephone warning would not have saved lives.) Down in the village, nobody saw anything, but everybody heard the noise. Gaynor Minett, an eight-year-old at the school, remembered four years later: It was a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can't remember any more but I woke up to find that a horrible nightmare had just begun in front of my eyes. The slide engulfed the school and about 20 houses in the village before coming to rest. Then there was total silence. George Williams, who was trapped in the wreckage, remembered that 'In that silence you couldn't hear a bird or a child'.

144 people died in the Aberfan disaster: 116 of them were school children. About half of the children at Pantglas Junior School, and five of their teachers, were killed. So horrifying was the disaster that everybody wanted to do something. Hundreds of people stopped what they were doing, threw a shovel in the car, and drove to Aberfan to try and help with the rescue. It was futile; the untrained rescuers merely got in the way of the trained rescue teams. Nobody was rescued alive after 11am on the day of the disaster, but it was nearly a week before all the bodies were recovered. "

Summer days

This is where I spent 80% of my childhood. Summers were hot, winters were cold. Remember when the climate did what it was supposed to do? Wish it was like that now, seems like it's just rain, rain, rain these days, and hard to tell one season from the other.

The rocks here were where I learned to climb, and scrape my knees and test my courage trying to tackle the "witches nose" a sticky out rock bit that was really tricky, you proved yourself by climbing across onto it then sitting there. I did it once, I was 8 years old. Life was so much simpler then

They called it the Quarry, not sure if there ever was a quarry site here, but roads got named after it. I lived along this road til I was 14, and bought my first house near there 20 years later.

I had wonderful memories of it as a kid, but when I was older and walked my dog here it had all changed, teenage kids sat on the new swings installed (cos kids cant make their own games these days) and smoked and drank cider and smashed bottles on the path.

The people had changed, gone were the wonderful neighbourly types, replaced by antisocial arseholes with superiority complexes. I hated living there as a grown up, and was never happier than the day we moved away. Sad really.

Summers were filled with 8 hour football games, played out on sloping pictures kicking plastic footballs kicked through t shirt goalposts. I also remember orange squash, my Man utd shirt, hayfever, sunburnt legs & calomine lotion, making grass blades whistle between your thumbs, sliding on cardboard boxes on the dried grass slopes, bazooka joe gum, cola bottles, dandelion and burdock, sardines on toast for dinner (lunch)
I also remember laughing and being happy.

Winter of '82

I was 17 when we had this great snowfall in Cardiff. These photos I stole of the BBC website, sorry if its a problem, but I doubt anyone is going to read this from there!

I should have been revising for my lower sixth January exams when this snowfall hit just around new years if I remember correctly. I think it was probably the last great snowfall of my youth. I had discovered wine, women and song, lots of the former, plenty of the latter and very little of the middle one considering I'd just been introduced to the delights of "Dumpsville", my innocent age was nearly over.
I remember the cars on Newport Rd being brought to a standstill, I remember cleaning the drive for my mum and dad, and there are somewhere pictures of me taken with mums Polaroid camera, her gift from Dad for xmas that year.

Payday!

Aha!!! At last found this little beauty on e Bay: Payday!!!!

Now this was one of the best, Xmas oooh well I'd reckon on '75 but info I found says this is a 1979 edition, but I'd have been 14 then, and into rock music and guitars, so i'd have been past the board game playing age. I distinctly remember being up about 6 in the morning dark outside, presents open, and mum and dad going back to bed, while me and sis played this one, whilst chomping my way through the first of many selection boxes! Like an idiots version of monopoloy, but much more fun. They still make it it seems, but this is the version I had and loved. Bidding for this baby, suprise my sister on boxing day this year with it!

Going...going...gone

Oh boy, just came across this old chestnut: Masterpiece

Yup, you can still buy it it seems, even if it's second hand. This was a family favourite in our household, well me and my sister anyway, one year around about 1975-6 I'd reckon. We never really "got" the rules, but thoroughly enjoyed holding our own little auctions, smugly grinning when we managed to palm off a fake to one another during a frantic bidding session! Not up there with Monopoly or Scrabble or Cluedo, but a definite blast from the past.

They call me Baby Driver ...Vroom Vroom part 2

Just found a pic of one of the cars, they were Ford Shadows, the colour on this one is close to how mine was, as I said earlier one was blue and one was red, so just visualise this one in red for the complete rose tinted picture.

Oh how I dreamed of the 6 wheeled Tyrrel, the black JPS or even the glorious red ferrari...long before the days of Schumacher and co, this was just post Graham Hill, and into the James Hunt/Nikki Lauder era. Back when Formula 1 was still a life or death game.