Sometimes when I read the words of Aristotle, Karl Marx, and Dr Seuss I think that I too can be a great thinker. So here is my blog on philosophical thoughts.

Or not. While drinking wine with a group of people we got talking about the weird and magical things we did in our youth. By youth I do not mean twenties like the people in their forties like to reminisce over. I mean primary school years. Here is a list of the odd things I did as a child that countless others from my generation did too.

Partly open a coke bottle and drinking with the cap on

Now I don't know why this was such a hip thing to do but the general gist was you got a bottle of coke (or any fizzy drink, pepsi if you were going against the grain, sparkling duets if you had the classy vibe going on), opened it slightly so the *fizz* sound happened, left the cap on and threw your head back while you sucked the sugar down like a right old trooper. I don't know why we did this or who thought it would be a great idea. All I remember is getting sore cheeks from desperately trying to suck more fizzy down than the tiny gap would allow. The number of times it leaked through my back-pack was ridiculous and I swear the teachers thought I owned brown books instead of the stock standard white and red 1B5s.

Chatter-rings

Imagine a circle of metal with five golden rings hanging off. You have the picture in your mind? Hold it there and imagine using one hand to hold the circle and the other to click the rings to make them chatter against each other and loop around the circle. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it was. But by joves this simple pleasure was one hell of a craze. Hours were spent trying to walk the dog (dragging it along the ground with all rings chattering), alternate chatting rings, swapping hands and a long list of other variations. A few months back I saw a teenager walking through town with chatter-rings. Being the kind of person who likes to state the obvious I exclaimed "Chatter-rings!" and memories came flooding back. He seemed pretty happy that I knew what they were, but I also think he thought I was a crazy head because I was by myself and wearing tights as pants. I remember a girl from school making her own chatter-rings out of a plastic tube and milk bottle tops. She was adamant that they could work and I spent a good fifteen minutes cheering her on in the hopes that the home-made version could upstage the Warehouse ones. Just so you all know they didn't work but I trust that they might have once if she shook them hard enough.

Pizza Hut buffet - a fat kid's heaven

I cannot remember a single time I went to Pizza Hut buffet and ate pizza. Before health and safety got all up in arms about the lack of hygiene standards (way to  buzz kill by the way) the Pizza Hut buffet was right up there with McDonald's birthday parties. The only difference being Pizza Hut offered an unlimited supply of dessert. The number of times a grudging parent would take a group of children to Pizza Hut and watch them compete against each other to eat mountains of ice cream, bowls of chocolate sauce and marshmallows and piles of jelly cubes makes me feel queasy. At the time it was unlimited fun followed by agonising pain. But this was before the days of weight gain and after the age when peeing in the ball pit of Georgie Pie was a big no no so we have to remember this with the fondest of emotions. In saying that I remember sitting in the bathroom of a Pizza Hut and crying because I thought my stomach was going  to explode. Thinking back it is a surprise I ever got invited anywhere. Who wants to be friends with the crying kid who can't handle their sugar? Kill joy.

Four Square

A true Kiwi kid knows this game. For those who don't know the almighty four square rules there were four squares (really Katie? Four squares?! Who would have thought!), four being the best and one being the worst. Each person had a square and the aim was to bounce the ball once in a square. Bouncing the ball twice in somebody's square kicked them out and the ranks moved up. Hours must have been spent pondering these rules, surely. The lunch bell would ring and I swear we must have looked like a pack of rats running to a mound of rubbish the way we sprinted to the four square courts. The same people always won and the same people always lost. One of the best days of my primary school life was beating one of the rugby boys and becoming number four. For that moment I was Queen of my primary school. The moment lasted two seconds when my arrogance and lack of hand-eye coordination got the better of me. Ahhh what dreams are made of.

Scooters

I am pleased to see that these have made quite the comeback. We had wheels day at our primary school and the kids who had any sort of wheels (boys had skateboards, girls had bicycles and a mixed bag had scooters) would go round and around and around the top field racing each other, doing kick flips and occasionally falling off. My scooter had bright orange wheels and came tumbling down a hill after me when I got cocky and decided to race a car that was driving down the road. I think that the person who put gravel on the driveway at the bottom of the street had it in mind that some little girl was going to one day zoom down the hill, lose control and fall down like a sack of potatoes onto the sharp pieces of stone. Which, by the way is not ideal when you have to pick gravel out of your hands and knees  when you're crying and cursing gravity. But ka pai to those modern retro kids who have managed to successfully stay upright on their scooters. Reminds me of the time when I thought I was a skateboard champ. Riding through student-ville was easy enough. Riding through the main street on a busy day with a slight hill was not. Big shout out to the lady who came running after me when I fell off and went skidding across the BP court. I'm sorry I ran away but I had to save my board from oncoming traffic and hide in a bush and cry. I was 20. Like a boss.

Superstar

When I wasn't dreaming of being an astronaut or teacher I wanted to be famous. The most obvious place to start was in front of the mirror with a hairbrush or impulse can, S Club 7 (or any other great 90s band) and a lung full of air. I know for a fact I was not the only person to sing pop songs in front of the mirror. But I do know that I was not one of the greatest. It would be sensational to say that I was a miniature Whitney Houston (excluding the drug problem and eventual overdose) but alas, my musical talent is similar to that of a group of sick and dying cats. To this day I am adamant that along with my loud and obnoxious voice, my 'intense' singing killed some of my Father's hearing cells (hearing cells?). Apologies Pops, if it helps I too am partially deaf. That will teach me for having no inside voice.

Chicken

I am sure that this was a universal game. There was an episode on Scrubs when JD and Dr Cox play gay chicken. I watched it as a teenager and laughed to myself about the times at primary school when a boy or girl would rub someone of the opposite sex on the leg and wait until either one yelled chicken. Being young and pre-pubescent this game only ever got to the mid thigh before somebody was too chicken to go on. I miss those days. Nowadays if someone were to play chicken it would lead to a full on pornographic film, minus the camera unless they were that way inclined. And hey, if that's what you're into you go get 'em tiger.

Superman

If you have never drawn a 3D superman 'S' then I just don't know what to say. For some reason drawing S on EVERYTHING was super cool and artistic. Lacking in any artistic ability (apart from the time when I drew a very life-like sloth and frightened a friend with it in high school) I always drew mine backwards. For some reason I could not grasp how peoples made theirs look like an actual S. Mine always looked like I had drawn it in the mirror. I had spent ages practising so I could turn up to school and be part of the in crowd with my super fly S when I must have panicked because the  S I drew on the whiteboard was once again back to front. So naturally I blamed it on a girl I hated and the boys laughed at her. Not my proudest moment but I freaked out and she always had the girls gushing over her latest Polly Pocket accessories. I couldn't afford Polly Pocket so the next best thing was a Superman S. Apologies to the girl who took the rat. You took it well by yelling and drawing a correct S. Nicely done.

Smack the groin

I had no idea what to put as a sub-title for this. Smack the groin seems appropriate and attention grabbing. Now was it just us Dunedin kids or did everybody else jump up, take both hands and bang both sides around the nether regions in a "screw you" type of action? This became the new fingers for a time and instead of flipping people the bird we would happily smack our crotches, grunting or saying "take THAT." Luckily we were too young and naive to understand the obvious sexual innuendo attached to this act and I am sure the older kids and our parents were face-palming at our actions.

Pen-pals for life

Whatever happened to snail mail? The good old days when you would carefully print a friend's name onto a crisp envelope, cover it with stamps and post it in the postbox only to wait for a week for a reply of "Hi. I too am fine. Thanks for the letter. See you at school. Friends for life." It was a good thing I wrote letters to myself, otherwise Valentines Day would have been awkward.

Memories. Sweet sweet memories. I hope I wasn't the weirdest kid on the block. I have a feeling I was but I'm okay with that.