In message , Mike Lyle
writes
I find it strangely reassuring that what with gameboys and
everything, this has come around again...

Me too. So has "jacks", apparently. We used to play that for
hours
on end with 10 little star-shaped metal things and a small bouncy
ball.

AKA "five stones"

In Godzone we actually sometimes played knucklebones with real dead
bones! We never quite knew the official rules, though. I'm reminded --
and this _is_ relevant to garden use -- of the routine by one of the
stand-ups (Billy Connolly maybe, but I've fallen out with him) about
boys intently watching girls playing hopscotch, trying in
ever-increasing bafflement to work out what on earth the rules were,
let alone the _object_ of the pastime

A girl thing ... but to stay on gardening: there were also daisy chains,
of course, but we made lots of other things out of flowers and twigs and
stones: petunia ballerina dolls, and frogs' chairs out of grass, and
pipes out of ... I don't remember, some twigs with a soft centre that
you could push out ... and 'tobacco' out of mulberry leaves (my brother
got into terrible trouble for that...

--
Klara, Gatwick basin