Machinery

I learned that I was not made for engineering (or even engineered for making) at an early age. As a child I wasn't particularly adept at using pester power, but I deployed it on a few occasions to get what I thought I wanted. My most magnificent triumph was the Fantom Four Hovercraft, a toy that brought such befuddlingly long-winded yet fleeting pleasures that it was either going to teach children the very meaning of patience, or end up in the bin.

But my most shameful experience came after identifying a very exciting looking box of Meccano in the local toy store (now a PC repair shop that also specialises in fixing Sky remotes). I banged on about it for ages, inspired by the amazing things the TV advert suggested I would be able to make.

Of course, what the TV doesn't make clearly, is that making anything interesting out of Meccano when you have the technical abilities of a gerbil requires hard work. Lots of hard work. The kind of hard work you're not really looking for in a toy shop, but might expect to find in some sort of El Salvadoran copper mine. I probably spent all of half an hour trying to stick some perfectly basic metal struts together, before realising that they were more fun if you pretending they were swords and rushing off to slay some dragons in the garden shed. Of which it turned out there were fuck loads. Who'd have thought it?

To this day, me and machinery get on like an EDL organiser and a Kurdish shopkeeper.