Dared to dream at Christmas

WHEN did the festive season begin for you as a youngster?

- Ken Rogers

Back in the late Fifties and into the Sixties, it would be early October for me, when my mother received her Littlewoods gift catalogue.Suddenly, classic reading books of the day like C.S. Lewis's 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' and Enid Blyton's 'Secret Seven' would be temporarily cast aside as we youngsters concentrated on the extensive toy pages of the Littlewoods catalogue, the publication that dreams were made of.

Our Christmas lists would now take shape, ridiculously long and ambitious at first, before being honed down to the reality of what our parents could actually afford. I always fancied, but never received a Meccano set that was clearly more than a toy.

I had visited one of my cousins when I was about eight. He had built a very impressive crane, learning the basic principles of mechanics in the process. Meccano almost certainly inspired thousands of future engineers.