Toys from Nature

I am off on a lovely 2 week holiday tonight, so Life in the 80s will not have any updates for a few weeks.

I thought I would leave you all with some memories of playing outside on summer days back in the 80s.

In the 1980s there was a lack of Ipods, Playstations and other gadgetry, so your entertainment would often be sourced from nature. Days spent playing hide and seek in wheat fields, ruining crops in farmers fields and running around in the woods were well spent as far as I am concerned.

There is the obvious stuff like climbing trees, riding your bike in the fields, and exploring, but nature also had other uses for imaginative 8 year olds with time on their hands.

Below are some of my favourite Toys of Nature that I remember.

Grass Darts
These were the little things that you could find growing all over the place in fields and stuff. The great thing was you could throw them a surprisingly long way, with a good degree of accuracy. They would embed themselves into hair, clothing, shoes, eyes, pretty much anything.
Generally you would arm yourself with 30 or 40 of these, and then find the nerdy kid at school and bombard the back of his jumper with them. Yeah, damn right.
Even today when I see one of these dart things, the urge overcomes me and I have to pluck it, and lob it straight at the jumper of the closest person to me. Brilliant.

Sticky Plants
There were the sticky plants that would grow in large clumps, and it would stick to jumpers, hair and woolly clothing, and the nerd at school would always be covered from head to toe in this stuff by the end of the day. Hahaha.

Itching seeds
No idea what they were actually called, or the scientific reasons behind the effects of this wonderful plant, but basically you would get this little orange berry, and when broken open it would reveal lots of little seeds. Then you would find the kid with Sticky plant all over his head and grass darts covering his back, and stick it down his jumper resulting in severe, chronic itching for about 20 minutes. Genius.

Bicycle Pump Gun
There were these evergreen trees that used to have little pea sized things growing on them. First you pick one off, stick it in the end of the bicycle pump. Then, you look for the guy covered in Grass Darts, Sticky Plants, writhing around on the floor itching in agony, and push the hanlde of the pump in as hard and fast as you could, and pump about 5 or 6 pea sized rounds into him with the bicycle pump.


The 80s truly were the glory days. Hahaha.

Browse previous posts on the menu to the left to satisfy your 80s nostalgia for the next couple of weeks, and I will be back with more nuggets of 80s memories soon.