Twenty Questions

Have I told you before about the occasionally-functioning Hornby electric train set?  It was Frankie's big Christmas present last year, and ever since has taken up pride of place in his bedroom, by which I mean pretty much every square inch of floor that wasn't already taken up by unmovable objects such as the bed, the wardrobe, and the thing-from-Ikea-which-started-life-as-a-changing-table-but-metamorphosised-into-a-set-of-shelves-sometime-around-2006.  For a few months it remained technically possible, with the aid of mere entry-level skills in contortionism, to wedge oneself between the lego box and the the radiator, thus freeing up the room's twelve square inches of remaining carpet space to do the sort of tasks the room used to be for before it was became a scale-model of pre-Beecher-report Britain, such as getting the boy's pyjamas on, or getting him ready for school.  That was never going to last though, and Frankie's last growth spurt- combined with a couple of near-misses, where my ageing body baulked at being asked to perform feats of pinpoint minituarist agility  worthy of a champion teenage yogi and came within inches of laying to waste a significant proportion of the self-contained public transport infrastructure- has seen the room withdrawn from public service indefinitely, with childcare operations diverted until further notice to less strategically important parts of the house.  

All of which would be perfectly fine and dandy, were it not for the fact that the occasionally-functioning Hornby Electric train set only occasionally works. Theories abound as to the cause of the stoppages, power-Failures and derailings which have plagued the twelve-piece starter track since its assembly, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the problem stems from the the wood-and-plastic base it sits on, which was perfectly flat when I hammered it together one afternoon in January using made-to-measure pieces carted home from the timber shop on Stockport Road, but which has gradually developed a pronounced hump stretching the length of its spine, in the process introducing an unplanned-for Pennine-sized mountain range as the centre-piece of our miniaturised topography, and bending several of the joins between the trackpieces beyond what they are prepared to tolerate. 

One Sunday I will get round to fixing it, but it will have to be when Frankie is out, as he has developed a deep romantic attachment to the occasionally-functioning train set (which he can afford to, since he is not the one who has to crawl around on his hands and knees seventeen times an hour uncoupling and then recoupling the carriages and gnarled trackpieces in a vain effort to restore timetabled order) and does not like to see its infrastructure tampered with in any way, even for its own good.  

Thankfully there are other diversions for a windy early Autumn Sunday afternoon, and not all of them involve doing me bloody back in.  One of them is provided by the model boat, which is a Christmas present from his Uncle Richard, and which works absolutely 100% of the time and never malfunctions in mid-adventure, which is fortunate since if it did I would be the one wading into the lake to retrieve it from the lake in Platt Fields Park (the nearest body of water to landlocked Levenshulme), much to the amusement of passing scallies, students, and Canada geese.  I didn't want to chance fate though, so we gave it twenty minutes the other day, Frankie and me, before retiring to the big play area, then the little play area, then back along fresher-thronged Wilmslow Road to the cross-town bus-stop outside of the Queen of Hearts, where we waited forty minutes for a Sunday-service 168 bus which, of course, never came, thus bringing our story of occasionally-functioning public transport to a neat conclusion.

Well it was nearly the conclusion.  We started off walking, but didn't too much notice the walk as we were continuing the game of twenty questions we had started at the Queen of Hearts, and which had ended in an honourable draw, with me failing to guess 'a plumber', which according to Frankie's unshakeably literal six-year-old's logic, is 'someone you might see on the telly'.  We were still debating the merits of that one when the errant cross-town omnibus came hurtling round the Kingsway roundabout to take us the last quarter-mile home in style. 

Comments

[looby]

Obviously a post-privatization train set.

[abby]

I am a novice in these matters -- having only grappled with the pretend Brio pieces you get from IKEA that have plastic nobbly bits that in some cases are what our uncle michael would call 'a thou out,' and which can entirely halt train operations. So I think you have hot the nail on the head with your diagnosis. I'd agree that a sneaky fix is in order!