Toys of your youth

I had this..... in fact I think this is the exact one! Large unbreakable earth movers were the best thing you could give a lad to play with... CSB time:

When I was 5 we moved into a new house and the people who lived there said they'd lost a tortoise in the garden the year before. It was winter when we moved in. Soon as the ground thawed I was out with my Tonka truck wreaking havoc on the flower beds. I was scooping up soil with my little shovel and bunging it in the truck, trundling down the garden and tipping it out in a big pile. Around the third or forth run I tipped out a load of earth which contained a hard brown shell... Took it in to my Mum who had a little look, put it in a cardboard box by the radiator. A few minutes later out pops a tortoise head and legs. Hey presto immedipet! He was ace. He'd hybernated the whole winter in the garden and was now gunning around our kitchen. Kept him for years. He used to think my red wellies were tomatoes and try to eat my feet.

You invented Pokemon!

Yeah those Tonka trucks were invincible. Made from nice thick gauge metal, not like the crap they churn out these days.

I used to live on a rather steep hill when I had mine at the tender age of 6. I would sit in the back of it and ride, gung ho, down the hill. It's amazing I didnt kill myself, as it felt like I was doing 40mph, but in reality and looking backI was more likely to be doing 7mph. Oh the joys of not so many cars on side streets back then. You could safely play in the road outside my home when I was a kid, as there were about 15 car owners to about 100 homes, and even then, they wouldn't use them until sunday.

Good times, good times indeed.