Building brick enemy of the vacuum cleaner

For sheer too-excited-to-eat-breakfast thrills, you couldn’t beat tumbling down the stairs of a birthday morning to find a bloody big, rattly box of Technic LEGO waiting for you. You’d just have to pray it wasn’t a school day. The hours would just fly by as you knelt, elbow deep in the most advanced children’s construction set ever, replete with working piston engines, pneumatic hoists, chunky, steerable rubber wheels and – if you were lucky - a working motor. By evening, you’d be driving around a custom dune buggy fork lift truck some seven feet in length. Or so it seemed.

Because that was the dream. The reality was a little different. By and large, LEGO came in intentionally rationed boxed sets of various sizes, each with ostensibly just the one goal – construct whatever was photographed on the lid. Like a scene from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, you’d be thinking yourself lucky if you got a small set once a year. Perhaps just enough to assemble a simple house, car or plane. Or, if you were dreadfully poor, a short wall.

As time went on, you’d be able to add a few of the larger, more flexible, models (a Legoland petrol station or – at the height of Star Wars fever – one of the cool space ships with transparent cockpits, satellite dishes and little astronaut figures) and slavishly follow the illustrated building instructions¹, at least the first time you put them together. Thereafter you could start to exercise the full force of your own creativity; making a space car, say, or… erm, a petrol house. Then there were the vocational sets, or the castles, the forts, the pirate ships. There were even some specialist sets designated only “for experienced LEGO builders” of 12 years and older. Experienced? Already our LEGO C.V. looked threadbare.

Two houses along, of course, would be the Verucca Salt type with a huge bin full of LEGO bricks of endless shapes and sizes which she would use to make houses for her dollies. For crying out loud! What about the electric transformer-equipped sets? How exactly were we supposed to be embraced by the LEGO System? What the hell was a Bionicle²?

Of course, we’re showing our age. Kids these days can build and program robots with LEGO Mindstorms³ or create and buy their very own personalized models online at the LEGO Factory⁴. The vintage stuff we were used to now shifts on eBay by the hundredweight, alongside those lovingly preserved boxed sets that now look clunky by today’s standards (but heck, it’s LEGO, how else is it going to look?).