When I was young I didn’t have a PlayStation, Game Boy, or computer to play with. I didn’t even have a television set or any such gadgets like that. But I do recall when Dad bought the first one in our avenue. I remember the whole of the street gathered into our tiny house and watched the screen in awe. Dad switched the telly on, received a round of applause from the neighbors, and we all huddled close to watch “The Cisco Kid”.

The only television set in the house was in the living room. Oh yes, we just had the one telly and it lived in a central position on a green-clothed card table beside the budgerigar. They hadn’t invented portables then. I don’t think we had a radio, can’t recall one. Mum and dad couldn’t afford it. No, I had a really hard up-bringing and had to make do with things called “friends”. It was quite an old fashioned principle but I thought I’d share it with you.

I think friends caught on because they were cheap, didn’t cost you anything and you could get them at school. If the ones at school weren’t any good you always swoop them when you got older. A friend was a real person and everyone I knew had one. They were tall or small, thin or fat or somewhere in between. They were boys and girls and you could get them with black hair as well as ginger, blond and various shares of brown hair. Some of them even had different skin colors, from yellow to black and shades in between. Some of them could play sport or musical instruments. They were the really interesting ones.

You could find friends in the park or the woods or in the streets where we lived. In the park my friends would play on the swings with me. In the woods I would be the Indian and my friends would be the cowboys hunting me down. Sometimes we would be soldiers with wooden guns that we’d fashioned from tree branches and we would practice ambushes. In the streets we would play marbles, hide and seek, and sometimes “knock and nash” on any of the doors of the neighbors we didn’t like. It was fun. I had a lot of friends. I kept them as long as possible and still play with my older friends now, but I lost a lot of them when I grew up and moved away. Sometimes you can misplace them, mistrust them, and even line them up wrongly, particularly when you’re checking out which is your best friend and which is your worst friend. The games are a bit different now, of course, but I’ve hidden in the woods and played with real guns that really do go “bang”.

Perhaps nothing much has changed. Some of my friends are a little gray now, perhaps bald, worn out, tired and just plain cantankerous. But I still keep them because you never know when you need them. Sometimes friends should have reunions so that they can keep in touch and talk about all the toys they played with years ago.

The great thing about friends is that you don’t need to keep them in the toy cupboard. They can find their own place to live and sometimes they bring their friends to meet you, so it’s really, “Cool, Man”. I think that’s what they say now.

I went back to the place I used to play with my friends recently. In the park there’s a sign saying that children must be “accompanied by an adult.” I didn’t know adults were allowed friends in the park. It was children only when I was young. The woods have been bulldozed to make way for a legoland housing estate full of identical houses and identical people. Even the gardens are the same size and every house has a tarmac drive with space for a grey or blue saloon car. The streets are different too. The gutters are full of empty beer cans and litter. I looked around. No-one seems to have friends anymore, just associates that come and go in the night.

Maybe everyone should have a hard life and throw away all those taken for granted necessary gadgets like televisions and DVD’s and so on. These don’t last very long. The council tip is full of unwanted gadgets and there’s talk of how to recycle your fridge and electrical items at the nearby supermarket. The rubbish collectors come every week to our house and take all the unwanted items away. I’ve thrown a lot of gadgets away but I’ve not ditched any friends yet.

My friends have lasted longer then all those gadgets. Those friends have changed over the years and some of them aren’t as fit as they were. But there still about and aren’t due for recycling just yet. So, if you want something new for your birthday, or want to give a gift to a loved one this Christmas, get yourself a new friend because they last much longer than gadgets.