Skip to main content

I-Spy Memories

 A few days ago I was reading for review a lovely little popular maths book called 1089 and All That (highly recommended - take a look at the review). A couple of pages into the book is an illustration of a child's book(let) called I-Spy on a Train Journey... and on seeing it, the memories just came flooding back.

For those who never encountered them, I-Spy books were a very 1950s/60s set of little books for children. (No connection with the 1990s I Spy series from Scholastic, but the originals were revamped in various decades.) The idea was they contained pictures/descriptions of all kinds of things you might see at a particular location, or during a particular activity, and you noted down as you spotted them, learning a little along the way.

My favourite, ideal for wet holidays in Wales and Cornwall, was I-Spy at the Seaside with a heady mix of creatures you might see in rock pools and unlikely sights like a lifeboat being launched. It just reeked of seaside holidays.

At the Seaside returns in the new series
The downside of these books were the obscure things. There was just no way you could get everything in the book - but you were determined to try. If you got enough points (I think, and here the memory's hazy, you got more points for obscure things), you could send the book off to some mysterious central organization, run, apparently, by 'Big Chief I-Spy', who would no doubt award you something or other, but I never got round to this. (I've no idea where the Red Indian (as it would be known then) theme came from.)

I honestly think these books were part of my stimulation to get interested in science. They encouraged you to explore, to find out, to discover. We could do with a new generation of these books, I think. Can we call back Big Chief I-Spy from retirement? I can but hope. (Update - I see from the Wikipedia article they were re-launched this year. Hurrah!)


Due to this being half term, my blogging this week will be sparse-to-non-existent. Please bear with me!
Labels:

Comments

  1. Lwaxanna25 October 2010 at 17:29

    50 points for obscure things - like "Tank Crossing". The Daily Mail ran the club. You got an I-Spy pack with codes and also badges.I got enough points once because I went somewhere which filled pretty much the whole book - can't remember which now. I do recall that Kensington Gardens was particularly good for rare dogs (I still know that a Chows tongue is black and what a Bedlington looks lie as well as the difference between the types of setter). Awesome. Triefd thjm with my kids but I think their day was already past. Now you can just find things on the net.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
118 comments
Read more

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...
25 comments
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more