EDITORIAL

At a party recently a friend did a truly impressive, onelegged, arms-a-flapping, slide across the polished floor that ended with a bump as his foot hit the lip of the step in through the french doors, a thump as he spreadeagled on the patio bricks and a few words I can’t print here, even though we’re all grownups. All it took was just one Lego brick. “And that,” said another friend, “is why I became an engineer.” We callously turned our backs on the injured and stared instead at Tim. “And..?” we demanded. “Well, Nanna bought a huge box of Lego from a church fair and I used to play and play with it. I loved it. And then one day I saw a programme on TV about the reconstruction of a stone bridge and they were restoring it bit by bit, brick by brick. I could do that, I thought. It’s just like Lego. When they finished the bridge the people were so happy because they could cross the river so easily on it. I thought I would like to build a bridge to make people happy like that so now I design bridges, although mostly out of steel.”

I looked at that brick. Lego reportedly has churned out more than 600 billion of them since the late 1940’s, around 80 each for everyone on Earth. Tim’s bridges may be impressive but how about Ole Kirk Christiansen, who engineered and manufactured that first interlinking block? Which just goes to show; don’t think it’s always going to be the big jobs that bring you kudos. You just never know where the little jobs might lead and it could well be to something bigger than you ever imagined.

P.S. It took four stitches to repair that chin. Lego 1 – Robbie 0.