It’s been fun watching and playing with the toys and games that the grandchildren brought to show us.  Some presents are very different from my young days like the ATM money box in the background. When I was young a knife was needed to withdraw coins from a slot in my piggy bank.   Today the ATM money bank was a hit especially as a ‘bank card’ and pin number is needed to insert and withdraw money and the date and time and balance are revealed on the screen.  Definitely progress in this technological age.

However I was thinking of all the plastic, expensive packaging and need for batteries to power so many presents and couldn’t help comparing more modern games which were played just as well previously with paper and pencils, an example being ‘four in a row’ which needs only paper with squares and two pencils.   Similarly many board games with counters and dice are now updated with minor changes. This game of Frustration is played very much like the simple board game of ludo with a few differences but players still compete to be the first to move four pieces all the way around a board using dice.  Some presents though, like mini indoor flying drones, are things that as a child I would never have imagined, but give so much fun.