I had a boy cousin (still do, come to that)
Whose whole world was, for him, a machine.
While the rest of us played on our bikes in the sun,
He took his to pieces – and not just for fun –
Testing modifications. Would this version run?
With occasional sweets in between.
One Christmas he had an old wireless set
Which he proudly displayed on the floor.
He’d removed all the parts and dismantled its case;
Examined each valve, disconnected the base.
Then (magic!) restored ev’ry one to its place;
Switched it on and it functioned once more!
Boadicea's Chariot 
Neat combination of pictures Janus. I have a brother who took a ,mantelpiece clock to bits when he was under ten years of age. I think he partly put it together again but our parents didn’t call it magic!
Nonetheless I DO like your piece! It must be the nostalgia.
Thank you, PG! The past gets bigger as it recedes, eh?
The boy was the same. Took the vacuum apart on a regular basis from about the age of three. Only the first time he did it were there any spare parts, I bawled him out for not putting the bits back together properly, after that he got it right. I drew the line when I found him taking the sockets off the walls with a purloined screwdriver!!
He spent the ten months of chemo disemboweling all the drug meters in the chemo ward on his bed and putting them back into working order. As he had an engineering degree by then they never stopped him, he was more effective than the technicians in the basement and a lot quicker.
He was ghastly/very useful at rendering anything into bits and reassembling. A new computer was the work of an afternoon from boxes of bits under his bed, literally. Not that they had any fancy cases just a mother board on the floor. I first contributed to My Telegraph on such, I used it for two years whilst in the UK. I gave all his bits to the head technician at the dept at the University, useful, valuable stuff.
I suppose I never discouraged him from such activities, better than watching bloody Sesame Street on TV.
But I did insist that he put things back together again properly unless it was broken anyway and just stripped for parts.
One of the more embarrassing incidents was the case of legs! He would keep all the prosthetic legs he had and they made him quite a few, he used to take them apart and reassemble them in differing combinations for differing purposes. After he died I couldn’t see my way clear to throwing them away so took them all back to Selly Oak hospital where there was a charity that put them in order and sent them to third world places for further use. You should have seen their faces when I emptied this vast sack of somewhat Frankensteinian legs onto their counter. Needless to say, I completely ignored their reaction with the usual basilisk eye!!!
And people wonder why I never had any more children? My eldest brother was as bad, he got into manufacturing explosives and blew up the veg garden at the age of 8! The old girl had nearly 11 years between him and my sister, can’t say I blame her!
Amusing memories.
CO – I enjoyed that, especially ‘legs on counter’.
My brother will be 65 next Monday. He was also into church organs as a teenager – literally would climb up, through and beyond all the pipe work. He had two or three friends at the time, all interested in classical music and sharing an interest in the prospect of assembling or building a pipe organ. One chap, a revolting guy who rode a greasy motorbike, managed to buy several pipes from a dismantled church organ and took them home to place in his mothers cellar, also laying a few in the spare drawing room and I do believe underneath his bed. Over 40 years later many of those pipes remain in his mother’s house, she being 87 now and totally oblivious to them!
I always have a few bits left over but the things I fix always work, I call it “Reverse Value Engineering” I just throw the left overs in an old empty paint tin, I have lots of old paint tins full of interesting but useless stuff.
I dunno LW I always found bits like that come in handy, the art form being remembering what is actually in the paint tins! I have cupboards full of fabric and wool on the same principle.
I picked up the collecting bits and pieces routine from my Dad. I still have a few of his tins and boxes of ‘useful’ bits.
papag, organ pipes under the bed are a mere bagatelle! I once found two sticks of weeping dynamite under the boy’s! I never did get a satisfactory answer as to how they got there, just a vague ‘that they were taken in trade’, what for was never revealed. I made him go and blow up a tree stump to get rid of them.
Wild West Wales, bless!
Janus another couple of generations and those tins and their contents will be valuable antiques. Hang onto them.
Christina, OK! Btw English can be very awkward. ‘Boy/girl cousins’ in Danish have their own words: fætter and kusine.
Interesting that the diphthong is still used in Danish, it has all but died in the UK and is as dead as a dodo here in the USA. If you spell paeony here correctly some SOB will knock out the a!
Yes, and å and ø too! It’s high time for an official change because many websites already drop them altogether.
I take it we’re not talking bikinis here?
Hi Janus.
Magical pome. 😉
And an very interested thread.
Oh bother, “interesting”, is what I meant.
Arrers, nobody wears bikinis here (alllegedly). And thank you kindly. 🙂