Scottish Squid Game

 Just finished watching Squid Game on Netflix, really good! The following will not make much sense if you have not seen it yet (do you live in a cave?) and perhaps even less sense if you never had a childhood growing up in Scotland as I do see some similarities with what we use to play as kids.

Red Light Green Light? Never heard of it as a kid, although it was similar to when the teacher in the classroom had her back to us whilst writing on the blackboard, that “green light” moment would sometimes prompt a rude hand gesture in her direction, usually the prongs but if she were to turn around catching the perpetrator in mid-action “red light” then the quick death of a snipers bullet to the head would have been more preferable than the wrath and punishment that would follow. 

Ppopgi, which was the honeycomb biscuit game …when we were kids we use to try and pick off the scabs on our knees trying not go get them to blood and peal them off in a “one’er” if we were successful then we could flick the disc of hardened blood towards the head of the kid sitting in front of us, if we failed then it would hurt like a bugger and get a bollocking of our mam when returning home “nae wonder that’s no healing with you picking at it aw the time” 

Marbles? We use to play a game called “chippy” flicking coins at a wall, the kid to get the closest would win the “pot”, many a loser lost their lunch money or had to walk home after betting and losing their bus fare.

Tug-of-war? Plenty times we push each other towards a dog shit on the pavement, the more agile gazelle like kids would dodge or gracefully hop over, the more heavy footed would either plough through it or splat right in the centre. Terrible trying to clean that brown mush from the treads of our Clarkes.

The actual Squid Game itself looks a wee bit familiar to Hopscotch, although it’s a lovely idyllic thought to believe we would be playing Hopscotch like wee Victorian urchins from a Charles Dickens novel but the truth of it was if we got our hands on a piece of chalk then more likely we’d be drawing a spurting phallus with two big hairy sacks using the playground tarmac as our canvas, but hey, these were our “cave paintings” to pass on elicit knowledge during a time where there was no such thing as internet porn, only wee Davy’s pack of exotica playing cards he smuggled back from his summer holiday in Spain.