I don't mean silly games, but ones we used to play when we were children.
This was prompted by a walk to Wymondham and back yesterday. This is my usual Monday wander, and it took me along a road that was laden with conkers. Well not laden as in "turn again Whittington Lord Mayor of London streets paved with gold" laden. But there were lots of them.
Now that's a situation I wouldn't have come across back in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Then conkers would have been snatched up as soon as they came off the trees. We waited eagerly for the conker season and it wasn't unusual for fights to break-out as we hassled to pick up the biggest. And what did we do with these brilliantly coloured and shiny things?
Yes we bashed them into oblivion. I guess most people who read my blog will be old enough to remember playing conkers. It was an adversarial game. You carefully poked a hole through the conker usually using a skewer and then attached a string with a strong knot on the end so the conker was left dangling. You then took turns with an opponent to smack his conker until such time as one of the conkers disintegrated and dropped to the floor.
Conkers could become champions because they took on the character of the conker they had demolished. Your conker then went on to challenge another and so on until it was itself destroyed and then you had to "string" another one.
You kept a tally of how many wins your conker had notched up. If it had beaten a conker with its own tally of four wins, yours immediately became a fiver (and that had nothing to do with money). Of course, conkers didn't last all that long but there were often some dirty tricks going on. Conkers would be steeped in vinegar overnight with the idea of making them harder (I was never sure whether this actually worked). They could even be put in the oven to bake them hard. This never seemed to work for me as I always seemed to leave them in too long and they became black and brittle and just fell apart.
I might be wrong, but nobody seems to play conkers anymore, or do they? I'm very happy to be proved wrong on that one. Of course, it was a dangerous game. If you missed your opponent's conker you might instead hit him/her on the arm or in the stomach. I hesitate to suggest this was done deliberately on occasion in order to inflict pain, but I have my suspicions on that one. Of course, sticking a skewer through a hard conker could also have its dangers if you kept your fingers in the wrong places.
Then there were different ways of holding your conker as you tried to hit that of your opponent. You could hold the head of the conker between two fingers to give you more power. Of course, you always had to keep in mind the fact that a good strike could damage your own conker as much as that of your opponents (a kind of conker own goal).
Anyway enough of violence. Let's turn our attention to a much gentler game - marbles. At my junior school there was a gulley that ran alongside the classrooms. This was ideal for playing marbles as it produced a channel where the marbles could bowl along. Marbles was a simple game the way we played it. I'm sure that there were much more complex ways of playing marbles but that wasn't for us. Essentially it was a game for as many players as wanted to play. The first would bowl his marble along a gulley and the second would try to hit it. Some of this could take place many yards away. If he hit the marble that marble would be captured and would be his. Players would take it in turns to bowl their marble, picking up opponents that they hit on the way.
Successful marblers (is that a word?) would collect marbles to add to their collection. There were small marbles and large bullseye marbles. If somebody used a large marble it couldn't be captured (presumably as they cost too much money) and so if hit you were given a replacement normal sized marble. Playing with a large marble was an ostentatious move as they were obviously easier to hit. It was a way of the marbler saying "look at me I've got a big one." I'm sure there were many variations on marble games.
For a number of years, I continued to play marbles indoors with the grandchildren. It was simple fun and didn't have the violent element that conkers had.
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For some reason my Monday chat with my cousin then turned to arcade games. That was prompted by a visit to what are generally known as slotties at the weekend in Sheringham. I bemoaned the lack of variety in 2p machines in Sheringham (there is a much better variety in nearby Cromer).
In Sheringham the 2p machines consist entirely of those tipping machines where you pop in 2p and it gets tipped down shelves towards a whole pile of 2ps that are tipping on the edge of toppling into your arms but, somehow, never do because the machine is made in such a way that they don't. But what is the purpose of these machines - it isn't simply to win a load of 2p coins because nobody ever does? And if you did, they would be of no use to you and you would simply put them back into the machine. So I guess it's just fun and you are paying to be entertained for a short while.
Back in my day (whenever that was) there was much more variety. The machine I remember is what I called the traffic light pinball. It was a pinball machine where you released a ball. Each time the ball hit an electronic bumper it changed the colour of a traffic light from red to amber to green and then back again. When the ball disappeared at the end of the go, if your traffic light was on green the machine dispensed a roll of sweets (usually fruit polos). The sweets would come out of the top of the machine and roll down the glass towards you. Those sweets tasted very sweet!
Then there was the upright bagatelle machine where a ball shot round and landed in a cup that might pay an amount of money but usually ended with the ball going into one of two losing slots. These machines were obviously made to lose much more than win. I always wondered whether they had some kind of magnet in them. Perhaps somebody could enlighten me on that one.
A bit more modern were the horse racing or motor racing games where you would bet on the colour of the winning horse/car. These gave the fun of the chase as much as anything else. I was never sure whether these knew which horses/cars had been bet on and adjusted themselves accordingly or whether they were truly random.
It's quite some time since I had a walk along the seafront at Great Yarmouth but a few years ago they had a room full of these retro games. You had to buy some old pennies (the big ugly ones that were used pre-decimalisation) and then put these into the old time machines. Again this was just fun as you couldn't win anything but it did roll the years back. No idea whether those machines are still there but I will check next time I go to Yarmouth.
Well that's it for today. In a coming blog I will reminisce about some more childish games and also board games (or should that be bored games) that I love and hate.