About Me
I have always loved LEGO.
This was my first set.
Set #310-3 – Tugboat, which was released in 1973, a year after I was born. I still have it (naturally) and sometimes the kids still play with it in the bath.
This was me in those days.
When I was little I always wanted to be a professional LEGO builder, but somehow I got lost along the way . . . .
Then in March 2018 I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. A few months later an occupational therapist noticed some of my son’s Lego lying around (there is always some of Ned’s LEGO lying around!). She suggested that I should spend a few minutes a day ‘playing’ with LEGO, in the hope that it would help to improve the mobility and dexterity in my problematic right arm.
That Christmas I decided to give it a go —- starting with some fairly abstract Christmas trees — and I was rapidly hooked . . . .
Then came Lockdown and I had to start ‘shielding’. I didn’t leave the house for the best part of four months, and the weekly LEGO #LetsBuildTogether challenges on Instagram just about kept me sane.
Pretty soon I was spending every minute I could spare from ‘working from home’ and ‘homeschooling’ the children building things out of their Lego . . . .
When the official LEGO challenges began to dry up, we started to dream up our own ideas — finding inspiration in our favourite books, films and records. We built a (not very accurate) scale model of our house, and tried to recreate some of the things we spotted on our travels as we started to venture out into the big wide world again.
We even designed and built our own LEGO picture book.
My dexterity has improved no end and there has — I think — been an unexpected, but probably equally important benefit to my mental health. There is something eminently satisfying about the reassuring click of two LEGO bricks snapping together. (Apparently, there is even a name for it: ‘clutch power’!)
I find designing and building my own LEGO creations utterly absorbing, and while working on them I seem to be able to find a peace of mind that I no longer get from reading, listening to music or watching television.
Now — having rediscovered my latent creative streak — we have set up an Etsy shop to try to sell cards and prints based on our designs. I am also hoping to persuade the good people at LEGO Ideas to turn some of our children’s book Brickheadz into actual LEGO sets, and we are even thinking of trying to get some of our stories published.
It’s probably just a pipe dream, but let’s see how we get on . . . . One brick at a time.
