661-Pete wrote:Sorry to have dwelt, upthread, on the downsides. Me bad!
I can remember happy afternoons careering down the snow-covered slopes on our home-built toboggan. This was an impressive affair, built of solid timber planks, pretty long, and with steel runners - and it was fast! OK, we're not talking bobsleigh or luge speeds here, but it was quite enough to give us kids the thrill of our lives. Certainly a lot more effective than those supermarket-bought, plastic apologies for sledges which you see kids mucking about on these days - if there ever is a flurry of snow for them to muck about on!
This would have been during the Great Winter of 1962-3 and the Big Freeze - when we certainly had no shortage of snow. I remember that, early on in the season, an old, rather worm-eaten old sledge with rusty runners, that we'd used up until then, snapped in half whilst my Dad was on it. So it was there and then that Dad took me along with him to the timber yard, bought the necessary pieces of wood and the steel strips for runners, and set to work in our garage building us the new sledge straightaway.
Possibly this was an act of atonement for breaking our old sledge. Or perhaps - just perhaps - this was an act of atonement for something else - seeing as I can remember my Dad delivering one of his aforementioned - ahem - 'corrections' a few days earlier. Maybe he'd realised he'd been a bit unjust. Maybe my mother remonstrated with him - or worse!
Anyway the new sledge performed excellently. I believe it is still in existence, though whether serviceable or not I don't know. My sister took it into her keeping - seeing as they live in a hilly part of Yorkshire that's blessed with more snow than us southerners. And she's got grandchildren to keep happy...
Strange to be writing of such things a few days after the Summer Solstice. Ah well!
One of the things I remember about my father was his practical side and the will to pass it on.
I remember when I wanted a bike, he bought an old (decent) Raleigh Wayfarer frame and between us we built the bike over about 4 weeks. That investment made it far more valuable than a new one.