saturday pm 21st march 2009
bedroom cupboard nostalgia
Tonight, at my parents' house I cleared out a cupboard containing memories from my childhood in dusty cardboard boxes.
First discovery is a coin-operated smartie dispenser that Dad and I made together when I was small. Obvious from the picture is the lack of security. Consider this a prototype 
A box full of Construx (a mechano-like building kit). Expensive at the time; now fetches £2-10 per boxload on eBay 
Videos containing "Falbro TV" episodes that my friend Richard and I made, including the "Alone in the Dark" films, with their ad-hoc scripts, high-pitched pre-adolescent "acting" and soundtrack painstakingly overlaid from a computer game.
A plastic car powered by air pressure, which I pumped up and released down the hall. Joy! It still works, making a tremendous noise and dispersing the cat in a flurry of paws.
Hundreds of disks containing DOS-era paraphernalia... boot disks, dial-up ISP disks from Compuserve and AOL, drivers downloaded laboriously over 300, 9600 and 57600 baud modems. Disks from Dad's old work labelled for accounting software, overwritten with games like Pinball Dreams, Lemmings, Xenon 2, Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom - the best of the 90's. Dusty joysticks with 25-pin game connectors; a flight yoke.
Boxes of orphaned hardware parts, representing the costly and wasteful upgrade path of PCs: at least fifteen old ISA and PCI sound cards, network cards and graphics cards. A power supply unit with a web of coloured cables hanging off, tangled with bits of old PC cases. And then a real gem.. a music synth soundcard - the Yamaha SW60XG, which had inspired me and my best friend, Richard, to spend weeks worth of evenings composing music using my computer and MIDI controller keyboard. In a stack of CDs I find backups containing our tunes. Tracks written by Richard, Chris H., myself, my dad and my sister. With anticipation, I loaded the MIDI music files onto my modern-day Mac, and sure enough they play, albeit without the same authentic instrument samples that the tunes were written for. They still sound great, though, and I'm proud of them.
"The Punisher" - a rudimentary taser constructed by me and Chris H, with instructions that read:
"3 Steps to Retribution:
- Hold charge button for 1-4 secs depending on punishment
- Ram into preferably moist flesh of victim
- Release button to discharge punishment"
Rocks laced with crystals that I found after hours scouring beaches near my grandparents house in Somerset. A small drill kit with broken bits from attempts to cut and polish the rocks.
Clay models I'd made at school - a cat who'd since lost its ears and tail, and a tiny model of a BBC micro computer.
An unused Marks and Spencer "Love in the Tub" set with two mini-bottles of Cava, a heart-shaped sponge, "bath bomb," a rubber duck and "do not disturb" sign. Intended for Valentines day with my girlfriend at the time, Suzy. No love in the tub was had, though, as she dumped me the following day.
An electronic gadget in the shape of a car bonnet, designed to mount on bicycle handlebars, with flashing LEDs and buttons to activate the sounds of machine guns, police sirens etc. Galvatron: a pint-sized man / gun / cannon-tank Transformer toy - these are prized possessions of my primary school days. Also, a disk containing a database of earnings that I made loaning a "Super Mario game watch" to kids at primary school. They paid me to borrow my game watch for a week, and I tracked the profits in a DataEase database. I was a child entrepreneur.
A tattered hardback: "The Spy's Guidebook," which taught a 9-year-old me how to make invisible ink from apple juice, wear disguises and shadow and trail people.
Printouts from "The Terrorist's Handbook," which taught a 14-year-old me how to make household explosives. I loved explosives!
A small jar of potassium permangenate - a substance which, when placed in a jam jar with a drop of petrol, capped and thrown against a hard surface, has the explosive power of a stick of dynamite. Memories of my accomplice and me siphoning petrol from a Mini, one dangerous night in South Woodham Ferrers. The bomb didn't explode.
That's just a few things from the cupboard. The nostalgia is overwhelming me, and I'm getting emotional. Particularly because I'll be having kids of my own in a few years and relics such as these, from a (mostly) innocent and unsophisticated world, are now obsolete. I'm an adult now. The world I grew up in is obsolete.
Allowing myself to get sad tonight. Sad because my children won't have the attention span required to construct things or compose things or blow things up. They will live in an consumption-rich, industry-poor world of cheap, accessible culture. They will have a false sense of maturity. They will be surrounded by spoilt children no matter where we choose to live. They will want "things," rather than tools. They won't want to build smartie dispensors from wood and plastic tubes. They will be too busy holographically gaming against their buddies around the world and trying entice me into some daft new social network. They will consume information 10x faster than our aging pre-millenial brains can cope with. Yet despite the massive resources available to them they will be intellectually stunted by attending a dumbed-down school where noone fails an exam, and where sports days are banned to avoid any child being a "loser".
I wish I was joking. My primary school banned competitive sports from sports day the year after I left.
I look forward to having children, and my girlfriend will make a truly awesome mum. I'll strive to build a loving, stable environment for my kids, but tonight has reminded me that their childhood will be totally different from mine. I'm worried I won't be able to entertain them, inspire them or relate to them as my parents did to me. That's why I feel sad tonight.
22/03/09 03:39am
(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
5 comments
add photo
Appreciate your thoughts. The photos are a touching essay in themselves. The collection said worlds about you and your childhood. I would love to see a hundred more.
11:19am
FAO "A Parent"
What are you waffling on about?? there is nothing in the world wrong with the tech enhanced upbringing Chris had... maybe you should let your kids have a more well rounded experience of life and education and not bring them up to shun technology...cos they'll end up struggling behind all the kids that WERE allowed to get involved!
Capiche!?
09:38am
Here are some things that I do with my children who are not going to grow up to be attention deficit or intellectually stunted:
We make kites and fly them in the park; we make Christmas wreaths; we make parachutes out of bin bags and paraffin and send them up into the sky (OK not very eco, but we don't do it that often); we have a pond full of frogs and tadpoles and they have a little tank to watch the life-cycle from spawn to froggy; we go camping in the countryside; we go travelling abroad in every school holiday; we pick berries from the park and make apple and blackberry crumble; we go to the City farm and they feed the goats and sheep; we go to the kiddies' park every day when it's good weather - they LOVE this more than anything; we go pot-holing in Yorkshire; we play crazy golf; we hang out with LOADS of other kids and go to the many local activities such as the soft ball park, swimming, playgroups, day trips to museums - the list is endless.
These are just a few of the things we do - most of these in London and most of these are free. None of these involve any sort of sophisticated technology or dumbing-down.
It's up to you as a parent to intellectually stimulate your children, to let them have the innocence of youth, to give them an antidote to the world of accessible culture. This is why we become parents, to pass on our values to our children, who then in turn pass them on to theirs.
Children only spend about 6 hours a day at school, so you have another 18 hours to provide a healthy, stable, well-balanced environment for them. By giving them a broad view of the world, they can choose which path to go down. All you can say is that you tried your best to give them the tools that they need to have a fulfilling life.
Children's minds are malleable and permeable. The greatest responsibility of a parent is to not let their minds be polluted by outside influences, but to raise your child with YOUR values.
So I wouldn't feel sad, but feel optimistic that you can raise children to be productive, compassionate, intellectual citizens of the world. I look forward to seeing how my children develop and grow, and I fully intend on keeping them stimulated in as many ways as possible that don't involve television, computers, celebrity-nonsense and mass-consumerism.
Lastly, with regards to schools, state schools are not really the best option, but there are alternatives depending on your income:
-Private Schools
-Home schooling
-Steiner Schools
I am sure there are other options, but these are a few that spring to mind.
08:04am
Fantastic memories Chris. I remember many of those things myself! I had the same spy book, the same pump-up car, a huge love of construx... and I remember at least one incident with your Punisher as well! You b#$%^&rd!
I disagree about the future of our children though. Our parents thought the same. We grew up with sophisticated computer equipment and games that were feared would kill our own imagination, and we used those technological trends to become more imaginative and inventive.
There will always be people in the world that would rather sit on their IMs and slowly converse with on-line 'friends' about banal activities all day long. And then there will be those that will seek to create entertainment and profit from these bottom-dwellers!
Think of Maggie-Chat. Who got the most fun from that? The people who chatted to one another in Mr Priestly's IT class, or us developers who got to reset their machines with a cunningly transmitted 'call !-4' command?
People who had rewarding upbringings like us will always endeavour to pass on the joys we experienced to our children. In much the same way, your father's passion for invention and outdoor activities was passed on to you. Don't lose hope yet!
06:01am
talk about taking me back , but i think you are being just a tad pesamistic lol kids will always be kids and your children when you have them will be as you want them to be , a spoilt child is spoilt if you spoil them, a kid will have a creative mind if you teach them, dont be sad about what lies ahead , look forward to becoming gr8 parents , remember kids learn from there parents as you did from yours , as they did from theirs, as for schooling there is nothing wrong with state schools, private schools etc still have the same problems, its how they are raised an educated child at home aswell as school will do brilliant no matter what school they are in because they will have the passion to learn.
so dont be sad think of all the fun you are going to have :)
10:36pm