Christmas in the 70s: simpler and more dangerous
OK, kids, I know you look at this column sometimes to check for exaggerations, embarrassments and outright lies, so while you’re here, here’s my Christmas list. There’s still today and tomorrow so if you drag yourselves vertical and hit the shops now, there’s still time.
I would really like a set of clackers please. You weren’t around in the 1970s and you missed yourselves generally, but these were one of the funnest (as you like to say, even though it’s not a word) bits: two hard plastic spheres joined by a bit of string (not to be confused with Japanese love balls) that you had to try and whack against each other, faster and faster in a blur until one skited off sideways and broke your wrist or blackened your eye. No longer available since they resulted in injury, particularly when they were used Argentinian-gaucho-felling-cattlewith-a-bolas style, as they often were at my school.
I’d like a set of clackers now because your grandmother wouldn’t let me and my brother have any at the time. And no, it’s not because she considered them lethal or had a presentiment they were destined for the Dangerous Toys You Can No Longer Buy List, because trust me, snowflake kids, nobody gave a monkey’s about health and safety in the 70s. One time when the garden gate slammed on my finger and chopped it off, I ran inside, cradling it in a pool of blood in my other palm to show it to my mother, and her response was: “Oh my God. Have you and your brother been fighting again?”
No, I wasn’t allowed clackers because they were deemed to be American. Along with anything else shopbought and plastic (America being the home of plastic and therefore probably “rubbish”, according to my parents). Much better to have something handsewn/knitted/grown. Or my very own LP version of Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’ poem, A Child’s Christmas in
Wales, Richard Burton, being top of my mother’s own Christmas list.
So, off you go, clackers if you can, failing that money is good, and in the meantime I’ll be curled up with Richard – he’s definitely grown on me. Thanks Mum. Merry Christmas.