Carol’s Column

Life is one big yoyo

THIS morning I was attacked by a yoyo.

The day started badly when the man in my life opened his eyes and said: "Good heavens, I married a mattress." A reference to my new ravishing, ruby-red hairdo. Ah well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and my beholder is half-blind without his glasses anyway.

I should have known it was one of those horrible mornings when the best thing to do is stay in bed and pretend the day will go away.

Of course it didn't, but then it never does.

Instead, I leapt out of bed into my fur slippers with the cut-off-backs for summer, had my early morning gargle, then fell downstairs because I tripped on a marble.

"In a rush?" said my husband, immaculate in dark suit, shaving cream around the ears and flat feet. "You must learn to relax a little, hang right in there baby."

I opened the kitchen door and was struck, full-frontal in the stomach, by a high-speed yoyo.

"Gee Ma, you mucked-up my yoyo roll," said Jamie in great distress.

The kitchen had turned into a yoyorium. There were yoyos everywhere.

Fried eggs on toast and orange juice had been abandoned as, like four mindless robots, the kids swung yoyos from extended arms. Backwards and forwards.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, slightly to the left of where the yoyo had struck its evil blow.

I realised the craze season had arrived with a bang.

And I knew — that you name it, hula hoops, frisbies, yoyos, scoobie-doos, marbles, skateboards, white mice, hand-tennis, grape-flavoured chewing gum, magic balls and pet rocks — we'd have them all.

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Sure enough, yoyos took over our home.

And then, as suddenly as they'd arrived, they disappeared, only to be taken over by skateboards of all shapes and sizes.

But skateboards had their definite advantages. As a form of transport, they were unbeatable.

Small, manoeuvrable and requiring no petrol, you could weave your way through the traffic with the greatest of ease.

Then came the hula hoop with everyone hula hooping through the day.

Jamie decided to leave school and become a hula hoop demonstrator at the Mall for R2 a session.

Unfortunately by the end of the week, he'd whittled his midsection to a frazzle, creating difficulties for the various tubes and organs usually accommodated within his inner frame. We reimbursed him for lost income and he returned to school.

Scoobie-doos, those attractive little pieces of coloured wire used to transmit telephone calls appeared throughout the house.

One sunny afternoon our telephone went on the blink. I observed a young gentleman and several lesser helpers across the lane fiddling with the myriad of telephone wires that would have spurted from the cable had they not been cut-off at the roots.

"Sabotage," he growled in answer to my pertinent query.

Did I dare tell him that I knew the entire telephone system of Parkwood had been turned into scoobie-doob bracelets and was playing cops and robbers on the jungle-jim?

Frisbies were banned when my mother-in-law's straw hat was decapitated at the stem. Or was it because that particular frisbie left the head behind?

And when our collection of white mice grew to 723, I let them loose on the Zoo Lake cricket pitch in the stealth of the night.

Rumour had it that numerous white mice were seen flying through the air to the sound of leather striking the hallowed willow.

But it was marbles that changed our lives.

If you think goons are men that wear floppy suits and tell jokes, milkies are cows of a kind and smokies are your mother-in-law for dinner — you're wrong. They're marbles. And at the moment, we are camping on the garden to accommodate the marbles Jamie accumulated when he took on the whole of Rosebank school single-handed and won.

They say that the latest in-thing in Johannesburg's a grobbel. Has anyone a grobbel or two to spare?

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