FLINTSTONES FLIBBA-DIBBA-DIB-DOB! (Or: NURSE!!!)

I suppose, looking back from the distance of decades, that I was a strange child.  Not potential serial-killer strange, but certainly not your run-of-the-mill average child that my peers appeared to be.  I suspect I've got something akin to an obsessive-compulsive personality (though not a 'disorder'), in that I develop routines that must be observed (like putting on my trousers after my underpants - except when I'm wearing my Superman costume, of course), but they're usually 'little' things of no great significance in the overall scheme of everyday life.

Consistency and continuity are important to me.  When I was 6, I recall being perturbed when one week's TV Century 21 (#20) changed the cover banner from red to yellow, and said something different than usual.  ('With Gerry Anderson's Stingray * Fireball XL5 * Supercar' became '25 Stingrays To Be Won!  See Page 9'.)  I bought another issue of #19 from the previous week (still on sale, surprisingly), cut off the banner and stuck it over the offending interloper - now I was happy.

Okay, but what's with the photo of Fred Flintstone, you may be wondering.  Well, around 1962 or '63, my mother bought me a Flintstones Flivver - a friction-drive tin toy with a plastic figure of Fred at the wheel.  It was manufactured by Marx Toys, and I must've retained the figure until at least 1973 or '74.  (The Flivver itself did not survive anywhere near as long.)  During that period, my family had lived in three more houses to the one we inhabited when I first acquired the toy, and I developed a peculiar habit while living in the middle of those three houses of visiting our very first one with Fred in tow.

See, every Sunday, we visited my maternal grandparents, and after tea, I'd take a little walk along to our first two homes (only a few minutes apart) just to gaze upon them again, and to reunite Fred with where he came from.  (H'mm, why does that seem even more bonkers in cold hard print?)  I suppose it was a 'pilgrimage' of sorts.  I carried him in my pocket, and when I reached my destination, I'd take Fred out and hold him facing the front of the first house as though he could 'see' it again.  Eventually, around my mid-teens, I disposed of Fred and any other surviving toys*, in an attempt to be more 'grown-up', but deep down I always regretted it.

(*There were two exceptions.  My Marx Thunderbolt horse and Wade porcelain Yogi Bear.)

Anyway, around a quarter of a century ago I acquired a replacement for my Flintstones Flivver and was happy to be reunited with it and its driver.  (The past come back to life as it seemed to me.)  Although I have no specific memory of doing so, I probably took a walk along to my old house with Fred to reconnect my memory of him to when we lived there.  (Dunno about you, but I'm almost inclined to call the men in white coats right now to come and take me away.)  So mission accomplished and all was right with the world (if not my mind).

Aha!  But then, a couple of years or so ago, I saw a Fred figure for sale on eBay.  At first I wasn't interested, as he was pretty beat up and I already had a better one.  However, as I looked at the seller's photos, I began to feel sorry for Fred and decided to buy him just so I could restore him to something resembling his former glory.  So that's what I did, and now I have two Freds to accompany me in however much is left of my journey through life.  I had to repair his nose, which had a bit missing, and to clean him up and restore him to a presentable condition as befits his status as a marker of my youth, and I think I did a pretty good job.

I've included some of the seller's photos (below) to give you an idea of just how poorly he was, alongside some of my own to present him as he appears now.  If you stayed to the end of this post, feel free to leave a comment telling my what a good job I did - or even just to tell me I'm as mad as a box of spiders.  (I'll let you in on a little secret - I knew that anyway.)

And just so my other Fred doesn't feel neglected, that's him below in his Flivver.  The box is a repro I made from an original one for the battery-operated version, though mine is friction-drive.