No Balls?
By Radical Rhymes
It was mission time today. The objective? To buy a soft ball (foam or similar) suitable to play with indoors. My youngest wants to play cricket professionally, so when the weather isn’t great, or when it’s too dark outside, he needs something that’s safe to use inside.
Well… I say ‘safe’. The soft balls still sting if they hit you in the face and they do occasionally lead to breakages. There is a routine now. When he picks up his little bat, everything fragile is moved out of the room. Sometimes we miss things, but all too often he doesn’t. CRACK. SMASH. SORRY!
Unfortunately, the ball we’ve been using – I throw it to him from my chair – has started to come apart. Despite tape and glue, it’s finished. Dead. Gone. It’s joined the choir invisible.
Therefore, it had to be replaced.
Don’t get me wrong, we have a number of soft balls, but most of them are not very good for indoor cricket. They are too hard, too soft, too heavy, too light, too… whatever. And that is an artefact of buying online, you cannot tell what you’re getting. They might look good, but they just don’t fit the bill.
Consequently, we went on a mission to find something useful. Cardiff is a very good city for shopping, it has pretty much everything and anything you could want. Toy shops. Sports shops. Those weird shops that stock a really diverse range of goods. Given that, the mission was an easy one, surely?
No. No it wasn’t.
Shop after shop, store after store, and we came up dry. Nothing in any of the toy shops or sports shops. Would you believe that? I couldn’t. Every toy you could think of but nothing remotely like a ball. A couple of footballs, a rugby ball or two (it is Wales after all), but no cricket sized soft balls. Hardly any kind of balls or outside toys at all.
It isn’t quite spring I suppose, so perhaps it is the time of year? That would be a reason I could stomach. What worries me is that balls and things that take children outside to play are becoming less and less available, more and more redundant.
A friend on Twitter told me that she bought her Grandchild a bucket of plastic soldiers recently and it caused a screaming tantrum. If toys don’t bleep, beep or ‘do something’ they are overlooked or dismissed. Is this the new reality? I’m not asking rhetorically, I genuinely wonder.
Maybe we need to return to some toys – not all, of course – that require imagination to play with? We certainly need to encourage more physical play. I was lucky now that I reflect on it. Give me a bat and ball I would be out with my friends all day. Not all progress is bad, but not all nostalgia is misplaced.
A long story short, we found a bunch of stress balls in a novelty shop that are just about perfect. Mission Impossible… Almost.
Radical Rhymes is a professional artist working with a range of media – predominantly animal/human portraits and landscapes – including, most recently, hand painted furniture. You can see his work on Instagram Radicalrhymes1969 or on Twitter @RhymesRadical.
For commissions, please contact him on Twitter via Direct Message or by email at: radicalrhymes@outlook.com His work is also available to buy on Etsy