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I saw this comic for sale on eBay recently and it brought back a specific childhood memory. You see, I once had a three-cornered blue boomerang, given away with a D.C. THOMSON comic I think, and I remember taking it with me to school one morning - perhaps the very morning I acquired it. I tried it out in the playground, but it landed on top of the roof of one of the annexe huts. There it stayed for a few days, and I had to forlornly gaze down at it from one of the classroom windows in the main building, tormented by the fact that it seemed forever beyond my reach. A few days later it was gone, but I never knew whether some agile schoolboy had climbed up a drainpipe to retrieve it, or it had been blown off the roof by a 'sudden gust of wind' during the night and been claimed by some lucky kid (though not this one).
Many years later (around 10 or 11), I acquired a duplicate boomerang (except for the colour, which was red), given away with the first issue of TORNADO (a different comic to the one above), and though I was extremely happy to have it, whenever I looked at it, I couldn't help but think of my original blue one and wish I'd been brave enough to climb onto the annexe hut's roof and rescue it. I sometimes wonder if the person who took possession of it has any specific happy memories of playing with it, which are dear to him, or is it a childhood toy he's long-forgotten? If any readers know which DCT comic gave away a three-cornered blue boomerang in the '60s, I'd appreciate you letting me know. Maybe that wee blue boomerang (or at least one of its clones) will come back to me yet. Below is a picture of my red one, acquired back in 1979, to kick-start your memories.
My dad brought a boomerang . Threw it. If hit a tree and vanished into the underbrush never to be seen again
ReplyDeleteThat's not a boomerang, PS - it's a stick.
ReplyDeleteI've no idea what it was called, but around 1984-85ish, I owned a plastic wheel about 1.5 inches across that fitted into a small piece of plastic held in the thumb and forefinger that had a bit of elastic stretched across it. You put the wheel in and held it in place with a finger then released it and it would glide for a far old distance.
ReplyDeleteOne day I decided to see how far up it would go- it flew up into the air then curved gracefully around and landed in the gutter on the roof of a two-storey building at my primary school. At the time, I realised I wasn't getting the wheel back, but I remember wondering to myself about its eventual fate - would it lie on the roof for decades before being found by some futuristic archeologist? More likely that it blew back off the roof or wound up in a bag of damp leaves the next time the school had the gutters cleaned.
As I say, I can't remember if this aerodynamic novelty had a name, but they were sold loose in the newsagents and came with a postage stamp sized bag of sweets sellotaped to them - the sweets were actually multicoloured balls not much bigger than hundreds-and-thousands.
Two questions for you or your learned readers, Kid;
1- Does anyone know what those flying disc things were called (or even does anyone else remember them?)
and
2- What's the singular of hundreds-and-thousands? (This has genuinely puzzled me for decades)
In the mid-'80s, I was in my mid-20s, DS, so such things would probably have escaped my notice - which it obviously did as it doesn't ring any bells with me. As for the singular of hundreds-and-thousands, how about one hundred thousand?
ReplyDelete