h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Scrabble was definitely fun - especially when us kids finally learned how to beat adults at it! Spirograph seemed to keep me amused for hours too - I just loved all the coloured and symmetrical patterns I could make. Oh, and a very treasured toy, or toys, were my set of felt pens and my Clangers colouring book! But, as kids, we found the boxes far more interesting than the actual toys - the boxes got turned into space-craft and castles and cranes and all kinds of fantastical places for us to play in. So, I think the boxes definitely were the favourites!

Scrabble - yes! And Spirograph too! I also had (and still have) a MindMover game, much like MasterMind, but with the alphabet instead of coloured dots.

Oh - I remember the Clangers! Hoot! Hoot! The Soup Dragon was my favourite!

I couldn't afford buying new colouring books all the time, so I used old phone books instead. I constructed spaceships in them. The pens I used were those heavy markers that stained through five pages.

I too didn't have many colouring books. Any old scrap of paper was used to scribble/draw on! But my Clangers book was a birthday present that I cherished, indeed I only coloured in one or two pictures as I wanted it to last and last and last.....

And then, one disastrous day, one of my brothers found it, and scribbled all over every page in it, ripped it, and even drew over the walls in my bedroom, ruining the felt pens at the same time.....

:; shakes head sadly :: an unhappy day.

Awww no!

I tried to look up the official Clangers site yesterday, but it seems to not exist anymore. I did find some fan pages - I don't remember they were in colours... Or maybe we had a b/w TV?

Saw on your space you use the word flutterby! ! I use that too quite a lot! Describes me perfectly.

They definitely were in colour! I bought myself the two videos just before crimbob as an ickle treat! Sad, but true :: smiles ::

Aww I've just checked out clangers.co.uk and it seems their servers are busy or broken :: sigh ::

Oh yes, flutterby describes my mind perfectly too - flits from this to that and then the other without a warning! Fun isn't it ?

Aaaah!!! I want the videos too!!!! *bounce bounce*

Are they as scary as I remember them?

I wanted to use flutterby as username here on the h2g2, but somebody had already taken it...

Oh very scary :: laughs loudly ::. They're just as cute and wonderful as I remember them! And from an adult's perspective, the stories are wonderful in a different way! I love the way they are curious about anything and everything, yet do no harm.

They were definitely worth the money - got them from Amazon or Bol or some similar online shoppy type place - and arrived the next day!

I remember the show as scary! Maybe it had to do with the fact that it was dubbed in a Norwegian dialect I've always disliked a lot... Besides, it wasn't exactly the therapeutic playschool fare we normally got fed when I grew up...

Just remembered - a friend and I used to make spaceship consoles out of shoeboxes and bits and pieces we took from big old wind-up alarmclocks and such. I wonder if today's kids with all the fancy toys that are available these days ever do things like that. Somehow I doubt it...

I should imagine there are a very small number who do ... sadly. Children don't seem to get the same chances to develop and practice their own imaginations these days. So much is handed to them, ready made. Perhaps I'm being cynical ... but then again perhaps not.