What I do remember though is that I wanted a set and never got one.

Basically Link (if that was its name of course) was a kit that allowed you to build houses out of real miniature bricks held together with cement, or at least something close to cement that was safe for kids to play with anyway.

You built up your model house exactly as if you were building a real house, laying the bricks in courses then slotting in windows and doors (assuming you’d left the right size gap of course) before putting on the roof, which I’m sure involved gluing little roof tiles together, though whether you had a wooden frame to build against like in a real house I’m not sure.

I think this is a toy that must have died out in the Eighties (or possibly late Seventies), but was extremely popular with little lads and lasses across the country during the Fifties and Sixties.

So what jerked this little memory? Well, I was browsing the website of retro toy specialist Hawkin’s Bazaar when I came across a modern day equivalent of this toy. It may have the distinctly uncatchy name of Universal Brick Building Kit but it looks like a lot of fun for a junior Bob the Builder of today (or maybe even a more senior one). You get bricks, windows and roof pieces and also some a little trowel to slap on the mortar, which is soluble so you can build a house, then wash away the mortar and start again.

The kit costs £40, which means you can also take advantage of the Hawkin’s Bazaar free Space Hopper offer (available to anyone spending at least £30 on the site). Just enter HOPPER at the checkout to claim yours.

It wasn’t until the toys were renamed Zoids and released in the US and Europe a couple of years later that they became popular, prompting a far more successful relaunch in Japan.

Unlike other robot toys like Transformers, the Zoids needed to be assembled before they could be played with, which meant if you had more than one set you could potentially make your own designs. They also came with motorised parts, so your completed model could even be made to walk.

Most of the original Zoids kits resembled dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus or other prehistoric animals such as the Sabre Tooth Tiger, rather than the perhaps more expected tanks and airplanes.

The brand lasted until the end of the eighties when it started to die away, but by the mid nineties it was back again. Since then the Zoids toys have gone in and out of production many times, sometimes being released by Tomy and some times as licensed releases by other toy companies. In addition to the toys themselves the Zoids name has also featured in comic books, cartoons and there are several videogames featuring them too.

Given the trouble I had trying to track down a decent image to accompany this (I ended up with a rather poor image of a currently available kit of this ilk) it looks as though this is another one of those past times which are gradually fading away as people move towards more immediate (and less messy) hobbies.

My personal memories of this toy are of a Paddington Bear themed set that I must have received as a present at some point. The kit comprised a couple of wibbly wobbly rubber moulds, a big bag of plaster of paris, lots of little plastic pots of acrylic paint and a paintbrush.

You mixed up the plaster of paris, poured it into the moulds, waited for a bit, then carefully (you might want to get an adult to help with this bit) peel away the mould to reveal a pure white statue of, in my case, Paddington. Daub some paint over it and voila, your very own statuette to display proudly on your shelf or window sill.

I remember having this ornament sat on my shelf for many years, as I was really pleased with it and only ever made one of them because we could never find anywhere that sold plaster of paris without having to buy another complete kit.

However, there was always one thing I never understood. Why was it called plaster of paris? Well, thanks to the Internet and it’s ability to know pretty much anything, I now know – apparently the name comes from the source of a large deposit of gypsum, which is located in Montmartre which is near to, yes, you’ve guessed it, Paris! I always imagined the reason must have been something far more interesting than that, but sorry, apparently not.

You can choose from a wallet made with either two Lego baseplates for the sides, or for a slightly thicker wallet the sides can be constructed from a variety of different coloured Lego bricks. The wallet opens via a sturdy zip which is glued to the two sides, which makes sense as I don’t think making the entire thing out of Lego would be that good an idea. They are available direct from ColorByNumbers, although last orders for Christmas have passed already unfortunately. Still, it’ll make a good next years birthday gift!

My next Lego inspired item is great for those who love to play in the kitchen! The Lego minifigure kitchen scales.

They are made in the shape of a giant Lego man head, complete with comedy moustache! The scales can weigh in both metric and imperial, and will make weighing out ingredients when cooking a bit more entertaining.

Keeping with the cooking theme, and to accompany the above kitchen scales, why not also consider some Lego men shaped cookie cutters. If you’re a fan of Gingerbread men and Lego then this is the perfect combination! They come in a set of two cutters, male and female, which I find quite amusing since I don’t ever recall seeing a Lego minifigure in a dress? The scales and the cutters are both available from the Official Lego Online Store.

To round up we have a couple of nice little items from Firebox. The first of these is the Lego USB Memory Stick which as you might have guessed is a memory stick in the shape of a Lego brick. Available in 2GB or 4GB versions and in three colours (red, blue and yellow), just make sure you don’t mistake it for a real Lego brick and end up with all your precious data in the wall of a Lego house.

The final item is a neat little Lego man keychain. You’ve been able to get a variety of the minifigures in keyring form for many years, but this fellow is especially nice because he is also a torch! Press his tummy and two little LED lights that are implanted in his feet will merrily shine forth, making it easier to get into your house at night when you can’t quite see the key hole.

I used to love watching these intricate displays on TV (I seem to recall Record Breakers showing the attempts quite regularly), marvelling at the sheer number of dominoes involved and the amazing effects that could be achieved. I remember one particular attempt at the record which recreated famous works of art such as the Mona Lisa using lots of coloured dominoes. Before toppling it looked like a big black rectangle, but afterwards the colours of the dominoes revealed the picture.

The sound of the dominoes falling over was also strangely soothing for some reason, with thousands of little clicky sounds merging to sound like a room full of tiny insects all applauding at once!

All this interest in domino toppling meant that before long the toy manufacturers realised that setting up a regular box of dominoes soon became boring because there weren’t enough in a set to do anything really interesting, so out came the Domino Rally sets. These packs usually consisted of several hundred dominoes and a couple of “set pieces”, larger plastic contraptions that did more interesting things like set off a rocket or flip a domino into the air.

Obstacles were also included such as flights of stairs and some shortcut sections which had several hinged dominoes on, so setting them up was just a case of flipping the dominoes upright and sitting the whole piece down.

Some of the early Domino Rally sets were a little disappointing though, as the dominoes included were quite lightweight and cheaply made. They often had a little raised edge on the standing surface which made them prone to falling over too easily, but later sets improved upon this design with better produced dominoes.

It seems though that domino toppling events are still taking place even now. Below is a video clip of some of the highlights of what I believe is the current world record, achieved by a group from the Netherlands. They managed to set up and topple more than 4 million dominoes which took more than two hours to topple – I have no idea how long they took to set up, must have been months! They’ve also included some of the clever picture layouts I mentioned above.

When I got old enough to play with regular Lego, my sister inherited my Duplo bricks, but she was lucky enough to get some more interesting bricks to play with.  Where I had to be content with just rectangular bricks she had a set to make a school class room with, with little square bodied people, a “blackboard” with pull out plastic lesson displays, a large piece with a clock on the side and best of all, a piece with a picture of a bell on it that had a little button in the top.  When you pressed the button, a bell chime rang!

I must admit I was probably a little jealous so I was quite happy to play with her with these new bricks, despite the fact they were really for toddlers!

Duplo bricks were first introduced in 1969, and are still popular today, especially the tie in sets for Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine.  Despite me calling them Big Lego they never had this name, although they were called Lego preschool from 1977  to 1979 (which was the period that my sisters school classroom set belongs to) and in 2002 the name changed to Explore for a couple of years, but the bricks remained the same.

Duplo is intended for children aged about 18 months old to 3 years, but the building fun can begin even earlier now with Lego Quatro, which can be used from a year, and Lego Baby (also known as Primo for a time) which is suitable for 6 month olds.  These latter bricks have only a single connection lug on the top, making them much easier for a baby to stack together.

These kits came with all the various little pieces attached to plastic frames.  The pieces were supposed to be removed using a craft knife and the little extra blobs of plastic sanded off.  More often than not I just used the “wiggle it about until it falls off” technique and then lived with the plastic nobbles.

Following the numbered  instructions carefully you got the required pieces for the step you were on, then glued them all together with polystyrene cement.  I used to hate that stuff.  You’d gently squeeze the tube and nothing would come out, so you squeeze harder and harder until it suddenly shot out a great dollop of the stuff all over the piece, your fingers, the table and anything else within squirting distance.  This invariable meant that the fuselage of the plane ended up with gluey fingerprint marks all over it.

Once it was all glued together, with the little man safely cocooned under the transparent plastic cockpit lid, the next step was to paint it.  You had little tubs of smelly paint made by Airfix or Humbrol that had to be shook up and stirred before use.  They came in a variety of colours which were all given code numbers, and the instructions told you which numbers you needed from which paint manufacturer.  Since the instructions were always just black and white you basically had a diagram with lots of numbered arrows telling you which colours to use where.

To be honest I hated the painting stage so I often skipped it, which meant I sometimes had some odd looking planes with blue wings and dark grey fuselage, but they still looked good.  My painting skills are not great, so they probably looked better unpainted than painted!

The final step was the most fiddly of all, which was applying the water transfers.  These came on a sheet of card which you had to cut up and then soak in water for a bit.  Eventually the transfer came loose from the card and it could be slid carefully onto the model.  You had to be careful too, as they were very easy to break or get folded up on top of themselves, which looked a right mess.

Still, I had a lot of fun making the kits, and once you’d mastered planes there were always kits of cars, helicopters, tanks, battleships and even soldiers.  I even remember one year I got a really cool model of the human skeleton for Christmas, which sat on my shelf for many years.

Sticklebricks were made from a hard wearing but flexible plastic, unsurprisingly in a variety of bright primary colours. The faces of the bricks were covered in hundreds of little plastic prongs, which were sized such that when you pushed the prongs of two bricks together they stuck, yet were still very easy to pry apart if you wanted to change your latest masterpiece.

They came in a range of different sizes, from long rectangles through squares and triangles to thin fingers, which in our set were yellow and always reminded me of the toffee fingers in Quality Street chocolates. There were also rotating wheels which could stick on the sides of blocks in order to build cars and other vehicles, and little round plastic discs which made excellent eyes!

Sticklebricks disappeared from our shelves sometime around the early 1990’s if I remember correctly, but I’m pleased to say they’re available again now and look just as good as I remember them, plus they have some nice new bricks such as little human heads (which are cube shaped!). For a monster tub of these cool building bricks pay a visit to the Amazon or eBay links below.