Must Have/Must Do: bring back the Pogo Stick

The pogo stick

At the risk of sounding like your irate aunty, kids really ought to forget about their Playstations for a day and heave their overweight, pallid bodies on to this playtime classic. It's not that the pogo stick is going to make anyone brighter or healthier - this simple piece of engineering was quite obviously frivolous, mindless entertainment. And that's just the point. Subjected as we are to the tyranny of tomb-raiding Lara, it's easy to forget that no one mistook the pogo stick for a way of life. It may have reigned supreme over its backyard peers, the fun-free skipping rope, the dandyish hula-hoop and the undignified space hopper, but you never found it canonised in glossy mag features. As Supergrass demonstrated perfectly in their recent video, the pogo stick is gloriously and blissfully silly ... thank God.