Meccano...

There are those amongst us who were brought up holding tiny silver spanners in their hands instead of silver spoons in their mouths. We are the Meccano generation; a generation of small boys who built cars, planes, locomotives, and steam engines from exploded drawings printed in incredibly complicated technical instruction booklets that a seasoned engineer – even one that had built the odd bridge or two – might fail to follow.

Despite this we all managed to build working cranes with winding platforms, suspension bridges with operating cantilevers, and fully working Second World War tanks that fired actual shells which exploded on impact… Didn’t we?

Well, I for one didn’t.

My Grandfather once bought me a huge set of ancient Meccano in an auction for five bob. It was most of what must once have been a Meccano cabinet no.10 set, and the boy that had once owned it had probably gone on to build multi-funnelled passenger ships, streamlined cars that beat the land speed record, maybe even the Doodlebugs that landed on London during the Blitz.

Even without the lid and with one drawer missing, my Meccano set was magnificent with all kinds of intriguing cogs, wheels, bases, pinions, joiners, braces, flywheels and dozen on dozen of tiny brass nuts and bolts that I never seemed to have enough of and always managed to cross-thread with that silly bent silver spanner. Yes, it was every budding engineer’s dream.

Thing was I wasn’t budding engineer inclined and, much to my Grandfather’s disappointment (disgust?), all I ever seemed to make were random Babylonesque towers of Meccano scrap, or surreal half-formed Meccano creatures – part wheel / part horse / part sellotape (I never did have enough of those dammed annoying nuts and bolts).

I did once make a car of a kind. Well, when I say car it had four wheels and a box thing that it might have been possible for a driver to sit in, IF only there had been a seat – oh, and a steering wheel.

Then there was my train, well it looked like a train to me.

“What IS that?” My dad asked me when it was finished.

“I call it ‘Man’s eternal struggle for self fulfilment in an age of sceptical neo-realism’.” Six year old me replied. Actually, I just looked sheepish and mumbled that I didn’t know and that it had just came out that way. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was a train.

And that’s how it has been ever since. I might set out with a complicated set of plans, some cogs and wheels, tiny brass nuts and bolts and all manner of stuff. I might even have a stupid bent silver spanner, but when it comes down to it, whatever I start out to make usually ends up as something different, something that ‘just came out that way’.

And I’m not just talking Meccano.