My mention of Humbrol paints in a post on Monday triggered a terrific Proustian memory-flash in a Canadian reader. He too assembled model airplanes in his childhood, and he painted them lovingly from those teeny Humbrol cans.

Having exhaustively debated model kits, painting techniques, and the virtues of different kinds of brushes, we are now discussing erector sets. Neither of us got very far with Meccano. His great love was Minibrix, to the degree that in late middle age he bought himself a set from a collectors’ site, and takes it out and plays with it.

I had one of the low-number Minibrix sets, but they were fearfully expensive in England for some reason, so I never ascended to the higher levels. I didn’t really get on with Minibrix, anyway. You had to lick the nipples for best adhesion, I remember, so that by the time you had a wall in place, you had a rubbery taste in your mouth that lasted a week. I was a Bayko man myself. When I retire (Ha! — hollow laugh) I shall go looking for a Bayko kit and follow my correspondent’s example.

There seems to be nothing nowadays but Lego; and my son and his coevals seemed to decide around age five that Lego is “babyish.” So where will future generations of architects and engineers come from?