[kirklancaster]

Believe it or not:

When I was a real nipper we were piss pot poor (as most were up our terrace street) and one Christmas, my mum could ill afford anything but managed to buy me some selection boxes, fresh fruit, and a Jumping Frog.

It was a little green hollow rubber frog which had a rubber tube attached and which ended in a hollow rubber 'bulb' which you held in your hand. When you squeezed the bulb the frog jumped.

I valued that simple little gift and spent hours playing with it. I even created my own 'Gymkhana/Obstacle course out of a square piece of stiff cardboard on which I painted a course and stuck different hurdles and obstacles on it which I fashioned from painted cardboard.

As a grown man in my early thirties, I once received a beautiful merc convertible as a Birthday gift (it's true) and I kid you not, when I first sat in that car in the beautiful leather seats, I closed my eyes and thought back to my childhood and how far I had come, and I actually remembered that little rubber frog and how poor we were despite my mum having 3 jobs and my dad being a miner, and I could have cried.

I do not think that I have ever taken anything or anyone for granted ever since.