Boys and their toys

This picture was inspired by Bomber's post of 18th July which was a portrait of a cameraman she had been working with holding an air rifle. No connection between the air rifle and his profession - it was just one of his boys toys, and we all have them. Not air rifles I mean, but things we don't really need but have just to amuse ourselves and feed our inner child. Mine is a remote controlled helicopter that I never use - tried it once in the lounge and did rather a lot of damage :-)

I have owned the air rifle in the picture since I was about 12 or 13. Amazingly at that age, my parents let me take it out with me and my friends and I would go over the fields and set targets up and shoot at them. I remember that you could buy air rifles and shot guns in the Grattans catalogue and pay for it over 20 weeks. How times have changed. It is much harder to buy these things now, and shot guns are of course tightly controlled. I couldn't imagine letting my children use one of these unsupervised around the house, let alone take it out to play!

Lovely meal with Rachel, Ross and Mags last night. Sat outside until it became a bit nippy then retired to the dining room and introduced them to Nimmt. A new German card game that we recently brought which is simple to learn, involves no skill but is good fun to play. This will be going on holiday with us along with the old favourites, Greed and Jungle Speed and a couple of new games not yet tried, Quirckle and Dobble.