The Proper Childhood Police people who want children to amuse themselves with wooden toys and penknives instead of PlayStations and Wii's think there's a virtue in making your own stuff to play with. These people seem to have forgotten all those Monty Python sketches about the futility of assembling Blue Peter style contraptions out of sticky-backed plastic and squeezy-bottles. In fact, they would like to turn the clock back even further to the days when the hoop and stick were considered hi-tec and 'Made in Hong Kong' was shorthand for 'work of the devil'.
But we all know that wooden toys had their limitations - no whirring sound effects, no flashing guns, no lights or mechanical motion - and the stuff we made ourselves was basically useless. I used to pretend a bent stick was a gun and it was crap. I longed for a cap-gun or a beautiful plastic ray-gun that whirred and sparked like a futuristic angle-grinder.
Here are some ideas for home-made fun to have with your kids that are guaranteed to disappoint...