Big Pink Hairy Coconut
Warming Up
8056/20997
Phoebe got Minion Top Trumps for Christmas. Also something called Plop Trumps which she didn't like as she thought it was distasteful that it was about actual poo. I haven't yet introduced her to the greatest Trump game ever, RHLSTP Trumps, still available to buy apparently (and I have a few left that I sell at gigs - all profit goes to making more podcasts)- not sure how she'll feel about her dad being the Top Trump!
But she loves maths and she loves drawing and I think she was intrigued to work out how the game works and she decided to hand make her own version. She decided to go for fruit and has spent the last two days making the cards. She's taking her time and I think plans to have at least 40 cards, but the first 8 or so are done. The tough thing about it is she keeps asking me about size, hardness and sweetness of fruit so I can help her ascertain what score each fruit should get in each. She has also recognised that it makes the game too easy if you score everything out of 100 so she has chosen different totals for each attribute.
I am OK on fruit size, but it's quite tricky to work out if one fruit is sweeter or even harder than another without having the fruit in front of you. Is a Mango harder than a grape? Is a coconut sweeter than an orange? Doesn't it depend on the particular fruit you have. You'd really need to sample a broad range of each fruit to fully determine, because if you've only got one then it might be a bit ripe or under-ripe or just not as sweet as the average. And coconut by-products can be really sweet and the milk is different than the flesh and orange pith is bitter. It's been a stressful couple of days.
Largely Phoebe has been making her own call and she's been fastidious and made each card look beautiful. Though I am a bit triggered by the coconut picture. Is that what it looks like? Is she trolling me? Why is the coconut pink? You might say that my excised ball wasn't 100 in size, but you'd be wrong about that. It was massive.
I tweeted the pic and a few people had some comments about the scores, but everyone agreed that the production values were great and that it was shaping up to a pretty workable version of the game. And I'd rather play fruit that planes of the second world war, which for some reason was the game I had as a kid. This girl will go far. I just don't know in what direction yet. Will she choose good or evil?
Ernie is being pretty inventive too. He got a police uniform for Christmas and has worn it for most of the time. He's also turned his shyness box into a police station, where he has a table to work at and a notice board. His policeman is of course armed and tends to go for his gun ahead of his baton or handcuffs, but with the justice system being what it is, a cop really has to take the law into their own hands these days if we're going to get the scum out of society.
They do love many of the too many presents that they got for Christmas, but it's good to see that a big box and some cards and pen and an imagination and a dad who doesn't really know how sweet different fruits are, still command the most attention.
Excellent work
My boys love top trumps, to the point that they formed the basis of my eldest’s Home Education year 6 project. Our approach to Home Ed is very relaxed, so the set of cards were his only formal, studied piece of work he produced that year, and the hours of dedicated research on his favourite animal, snakes, shows. There are 30 cards in the set, each painstakingly designed, inc pictures and facts copied from an adult’s snake encyclopaedia. Sample card: Brazilian Rainbow Boa; colours 3; greatness 58; length 200cm; page 110; fact: ‘has heat sensitive pits on it’s lips enabling efficient hunting of endotherms at night. Captures and constricts a wide variety of birds and up to medium sized mammals. Has a prehensile tail, arrow shaped head and powerful body’.
My middle son made top trumps based on philosophers (inspired by the Monty Python Philosophers’ Song, because my boys have excellent taste so obviously love Monty Python). He is much less focussed, however, so his real masterwork is a set for another game which is perfectly suited to his creative flair. The name of the game escapes me but it involves drawing cards that affect game play. The most memorable card is ‘Angry Rainbow’ 😂 Wish I had it to hand so I could look up what consequences picking it up has on the bearer.
My 8 year old recently made a small set on animals, with drawings that are peerless in at once being simple and striking, hilarious, clever and characterful (from the age of 3 he’s been able to capture in a few dashed lines what the rest of us could never come close to however hard we tried; I’m still in awe of his angry jellyfish). His elephant is drawn face on, which it would never in a million years have occurred to me to do; his panda looks like a comic grumpy old man, scolding someone to stage right. His stats that are the most playable of any of them.
All of this is to say that kids are amazing, and never more so than when they independently set about tasks they’ve set for themselves, with the passion and patience to see them through. It’s wonderful to see Phoebe embarking on her own project and hearing about the qualities of fruits that have captured her imagination. Thank you for sharing. I know you’ll treasure those cards for years to come. The ones my sons made are so precious to me, as physical incarnations of who they are, that when they leave home I’m going to beg them to leave them behind. And watch out, these years pass so fast! I can’t get over my eldest being 14; it was a real shock to me when my sister pointed out last week that that means he’s going to turn 15 in a few months - that can’t possibly be true! To me he’s still a 10 year old lovingly researching snakes. Hang onto that hairy coconut, Richard, it’s a potent symbol of this special moment in time.