LEGO® Story #20

LEGO® has always been a part of my life. As young as 3 years old I was playing with it. My father traveled a lot when I was young and, back in those days, the only toy available at airports was LEGO®. I used to wait for him to come home, not just to see him, but to see what LEGO® he had found.

As I grew older, I moved through the various genres of the brick, from town and space through the electronic train and into Technic. I have always been an early riser and my mother said she always knew when I was awake because she could hear the LEGO® being rummaged through.

I was never someone that played with LEGO®, I was always purely a builder. Nothing was ever finished so there was no time to swoop the spaceship through the air, I could always see how it could be improved or that it needed a landing pad or support truck.

By the time I was 13 and moving into being a teenager I had amassed quite a collection and had a permanent LEGO® layout in my room. My move to boarding school started my path into adulthood and I put my LEGO® into several large storage boxes and hid them in my parents’ loft. It was not until years later with the birth of my 3 children that my LEGO® was recovered, and I started an entirely new relationship with my lost youth.

I delighted in teaching them how to build but would find myself staying up late into the night building. Buying LEGO® for them and spending time building reconnected me with lots of happy memories and feelings from my youth which helped me through 2 nasty divorces. I can remember at the end of my first marriage building a huge Eagle Transporter from Space 1999 that was minifigure scale and over a meter long.

As my children grew away from LEGO®, LEGO® became more and more a part of my life. I used building as time to think and reflect. I was never happier than building, listening to an audio book and letting my mind wonder over all the problems of my life. My LEGO® was listed in my second divorce and I nearly lost my 1^st Edition Millennium Falcon! Fortunately, I have managed to hold onto it although it was destroyed and had to be rebuilt from scratch!

Now a bachelor, and still a big kid, I have embraced my LEGO® heritage. It is a huge part of my life. I have a “mini figure me” the travels all over the world with me and has been to some amazing places from Maputo to Burma. It always gets a huge smile when I set him up to take a picture.

During the recent renovation of my home I was determined to make LEGO® a permanent part of the building, making a corner of a garden wall a feature to look like the entire wall was LEGO®. It is this that has inspired me to build a LEGO® house into the corner wall of the kitchen. The house is about to have all the windows changed so my LEGO® room is packed up but I do have some of my favourite pieces on display in the downstairs toilet!

Laurence Woolford – United Kingdom.