If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there - Lewis Carroll

I'm fairly used to the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my fellow humans - I have to be, life with Robbie is full of surprises. However I was startled when a rather odd looking man rushed out in front of my car as I drove down the road yesterday. I came to an abrupt halt and the man stood in the road in front of me, turned face the car and saluted! He then engaged in a series of repetitive hand movements as if he was conducting an invisible orchestra, but something about the movements reminded me of the mechanical movements of the figures on the Trumpton clock. Then the man stopped conducting his orchestra, saluted again and marched back to the side of the road enabling me to continue on my way totally bemused by the experience. 

As I drove away I wondered why seemingly insignificant childhood memories such as the Trumpton clock remain vivid in my mind so many years later. My daughter Emily introduced me to Pinterest a while ago and I have to confess I'm addicted to it, I've been creating a album (known as a board) of childhood memories. Pinterest enables you to create and share as many boards and add as many images as you like.  The comics and television programmes of my childhood took up so much space on my childhood memories board that they had to be moved to create boards of their own. Comics played an important part of my life when I was growing up and I looked forward to the arrival of my comics each week with a sense of anticipation which the children of today wouldn't understand. Every issue was read from cover to cover and then saved to be read again another day. Creating that board of all my old comic favourites brought so many memories flooding back.

One of my early favourites was a comic called Treasure which included a beautifully illustrated comic strip about Wizard Weasel who created all sorts of trouble in Princess Marigold Land. I have recently bought a few old copies of Treasure and I realise how wonderful the artwork was, no wonder that it could keep me occupied for hours. As soon as I could read independently I discovered the joys of Beezer, Topper, Sparky, Cor, Beano and Dandy. Cor was my favourite, but I had favourite characters in each of the comics so I read as many comics as I could each week. I liked Keyhole Kate, Beryl the Peril, Desperate Dan, The Bash Street Kids, Mini the Minx, Pop, Dick and Harry and Ivor Lott and Tony Broke to name but a few. I wasn't the sort of little girl who read the Bunty, my comic heroes were all rebels and none of them would be considered politically correct in this day and age. 

One of the characters who has stood the test of time is Minnie the Minx, she looks a bit like a female version of Dennis the Menace but to me she always seemed a bit cleverer and more rebellious than Dennis. I enjoyed her antics but it never occurred to me to copy them, I was a bit of a tomboy but I was a well behaved child and I knew the difference fiction and real life. I think what appealed to me about Minnie the Minx (and some of my other favourite characters) was that she lived life her way, being a girl didn't stop her doing anything. Jim Petrie the artist who drew Minnie the Minx for over forty years (from the beginning of the 1960's to 2001) died at the end of August 2014 and when I read his obituary I realised that I owe a debt of gratitude to the many comic artists and illustrators, whose work entertained us and helped to develop a lifelong habit of reading. The heyday of comics is long gone, times have changed, but Minnie the Minx is still going strong, she was 60 last year - she even has her own statue in Dundee.

The rabbit has a shiny nose as nature does intend, because it has a powder puff at the other end

The rhyme in the title is one that I learnt in childhood - before I moved on to more dubious playground rhymes! Judging by Robbie's recent difficulty when building the Lego figure in a rabbit suit, he probably didn't learn that little rhyme. 

One of our regular blog readers has asked for a picture of Robbie's version of the rabbit suit figure, so here it is. I am surprised that he didn't notice that the arms were on backwards, but more to the point what did he think the tail was? The bunny version of a fig leaf perhaps, or perhaps it was a Scottish rabbit with the bunny version of a sporran! 

Taking another look at this minifigure had made me wonder if someone at Lego has a slightly warped sense of humour, that rabbit is holding an implausibly large carrot, and the gorilla suit figure from a previous minifigure series is armed with a banana of equally magnificent proportions! 

Taken Hostage

Robbie is a man of many passions, as well as his obsession with all things railway related, buses, die-cast models, music and vinyl records, he loves Lego and he has started to collect the little Lego men that are sold in individual packs. He already had the surfer and the karate champion and I bought him some more for Christmas, but his two originals went missing on Christmas Day. They were found on boxing day morning hidden on the bookcase with Wii games, so when we set the table for lunch Robbie put them on the mantelpiece to keep them safe. They made an odd addition to the crib, we now had 3 kings, a shepherd, a surfer and a karate champion visiting baby Jesus!

When we sat down to lunch Robbie noticed that his men were missing again, he was not a happy chap. In fact judging by the fuss he caused, I thought he had been abducted by aliens and replaced with an 8 year old! In the end he was pacified when I promised that I would find the Lego Men, but unfortunately that has proved more difficult than I expected. The prank seemed to have Sam's signature on it, but after close interrogation I am satisfied that he didn't do it. With a slight smile he said that he wished he had thought of it, because it was funny but he couldn't take the credit for this one! I questioned the girls too and I am not convinced that they know anything about it either. Having searched high and low I am wondering if they were accidentally thrown out with the debris from the crackers. Robbie on the other hand is convinced that they have been taken hostage and he is expecting a ransom note in the post any day now - or perhaps we will receive a series of postcards from well travelled Lego Men!!