I made a fort out of Lego tonight.
I know. I am that busy. Actually, that's not a joke, I've got tons of stuff I need to do. My to-do list is a chronicle of unticked boxes. Sorry, unselected... check boxes... for all you technical authors who can't switch it off on a Friday night.
Not that I'm exactly a Friday night party animal. I made a fort out of Lego... on my own... from a box of old Lego. My... nostalgic Lego that the niblings play with whenever they come round.
I don't know how it happened. I sort of got distracted and started rummaging through the wooden box, looking for pieces. I used to have lots of Lego: castles and spaceships, windmills and airports, knights and racing drivers... there was a time when it fired my imagination, filled me with excitement and stoked the latent fires of creativity in the corners of my sensitive soul.
About 8:30 tonight apparently.
No, I mean when I was about 9. That's probably the right age for Lego, rather than 37. Still, it did bring back a few memories. I found a few tattered old pieces I once loved - angled bricks and hinged lids, those little two-ers that flip up like headlamps, and the windscreens of vehicles long since lost or dismantled. Some of those old pieces had been bent out of shape by time it seemed, which was rather poignant and more than a little sad. Others had clearly been trodden on by an angry foot. Forget broken glass or hot coals - every parent knows the real challenge for one of those eastern fakirs would be to walk on a path of assorted Lego bricks.
Someone wise once said:
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
That's what I said to my Mum when she saw me sprawling across the floor, making a fort from a sea of multicoloured plastic pieces.
"Who are you then, Peter Pan?" she smiled.
The latent fires of creativity. I'll be honest, I think I need those fires to be stoked - especially at the end of an exhausting (and frankly, difficult) week. Maybe I'll factor in Lego time a bit more often.
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