Part 2

Part 2:

When I moved out of the family home I took a lot of my Lego collection with me, leaving some of it behind as my younger brothers where still playing with it.

Other than buying a black Lego steam engine, I really didn't buy much Lego at that time, I am not sure why exactly, but I did by some old Mask Toys on eBay for some bizarre reason.  Probably because I was bored and my girlfriend at the time, who was not that supportive of my interests and more interested in socializing, which has never been my main thing.

Things changed drastically when I moved into my current house with my long serving unofficial wife, perhaps it was because I was in a happy and stable relationship and able to be who I wanted to be.   From here a tradition was continued and every Christmas I would get a Lego set (mainly Star wars), which I would then build on Christmas day.

 I know that I was never far away from Lego, even as an adult as I bought the very first Batman Lego bat-mobile set whilst in Germany.  I was there for an exchange (and had been there previously many times), whilst I was looking in a local toy shop I saw that Batman had come out and had to blow the last of my spending money on it.

I think there was a couple of Christmas were the tradition was not kept, but that was probably my sons first Christmas when I was busy with him and his toys. 

My son had lots of Duplo but finally got interested in Lego about a couple of years ago.  More so last year at Easter when we visited my parents in Spain.  I had bought him a Ninja Turtles set and he liked it so much we scoured the local toy shops for more.  As my parents live in rural Spain this was not easy, and we sure did go to a lot of toy shops, none of them had Turtles and in the end he settled on Chima.  Since then we have taken him to Lego land (staying in the hotel which was awesome), and really just going Lego mad.  I do seem to be playing catch up now, not only with the sets I missed, but also on the depth of the Lego community, both adults and child.

In order to try and contain the Lego, custom play tables were made in my sons bedroom for him to play on. The problem being is that there is not a massive amount of room in his bedroom, so maximizing space is challenging.  We both tried different layouts but could not really find things that were going to be structured and playable.  We have finally got a plan which involves a kind of two tier Lego City, and this is really the main project at the moment.  trying to get a nice City with lots of features into such a small space.

This brings me up to February of 2014, and the worst time of my life so far for me and my family.

To be continued.....

The Beginning

Best place to start is at the beginning. 

Back in the early 1980's I was a young boy that loved playing with Lego and I got various sets throughout that period. Mostly they were space sets, Knights and buckets of building bricks.

Over the next 10 years my lego set grew along with me and my siblings.  The happy memories of my childhood were building and playing with Lego with my older Sister Clare, and my younger brothers Glenn and Scott.

Clare built houses and made them look pretty, always using one colour (white mostly), where as me and my brothers would often just use what ever colour we could get our hands on.  So most of our buildings would be multi-coloured.  I used to like making futuristic house boats, but when we got our first Lego Castle set 6080 I tended to use that as my house.  I would play knights or "city" and just change the castle in my imagination to travel back in time to when it was a working castle. Then jumping forward to present day when it was a stately home. 

I then got the original space police and Blacktron as the baddies, building a huge space base on my dads snooker table.  This was the play table for a large Knights castle with a Lion mouth as the drawbridge and paws of to the side that housed secret entrances.  I was very proud of it and wish I had kept photos of it to show my nearly 6 year old son it.  Not sure how my dad felt about using his full size expensive snooker table as play table but hey ho.  

The only other important sets I can really remember where 6932 Lego Airport, 6544 Shuttle Transcon 2 and 8860 Technic car.  Been going through Brickset and adding all the sets I can remember having, and some of the pieces I still have. 

We sold the Snooker table when we moved to a smaller house, and from then on we had a white all in one play table, the kind with air hockey table football and pool for kids.  On that I made a large airport space shuttle base and would build and play for hours even though I was well into my teens.

As I got older and found girls, I moved away from Lego.  I was learning the guitar and I guess becoming a typical teen but did not really grow up.  I bought a Lego train set with my first monthly wage at 18, only really because I could and that my dad would not buy me one.  Probably because he had spent a small fortune on Hornby train sets, something which I really didn't get into.

I also still played from time to time with my youngest brother Scott who was 12 years younger than me.  I bought quite a few of the aquazone and made custom versions based on sea creatures. As a fan of Star Trek the next generation, I used ideas of an underwater planet as a theme. Creating Dolphin and Orca class submarines with different colour right arms to designate ranks on my mini figs. I remember yellow being ensign and red being Commander.  I created a mini comic book based on this, but sadly have lost this over time.  Still got all the pieces of the sets, but this brings us to the last days of my relationship with Lego as a Son and child.

The last sets that I bought before I moved out of my family home, were the very first star wars sets, including the first x-wing 7140 and the first millennium falcon 7190.  The latter being sat in front of me fully built, pride of place on my Computer desk.

Next takes up to present day and being a father myself and an AFOL.

The story continues....