from the Cork Evening Echo, 3 May 2003

If you're tired of reading fiction and want a book that will teach you a new activity, you could do worse than try you hand at String Games and Stories.

With television, computer games and all manner of high-tech toys competing for young people's attention, it is hardly surprising that the modest art of string winding has faded into the background as a children's game.

It was however, a pretty much compulsory subject for little girls in the school playground 30 years ago, when along with skipping, elastics, marbles, hopscotch and conkers, it was a very important part of daily life for girls under the age of 10.

If you ever played string games, winding and pulling a (usually rather grubby) loop of string around your fingers to make intricate patterns, then the first game you will probably have discovered is 'cat's cradle'.

Pull the Other One begins with this game for two people, which is one of the easiest to learn, and I was disgusted to find that not only had I forgotten how to do it, but that it was not as easy as I imagined to re-learn from a book.

This book gives you step-by-step diagrams on each movement and is recommended for children aged five and upwards, although perhaps it should also suggest an upper age limit, say 20, at which point you cease to be able to produce anything but a tangle out of your string.

I felt like a fumbling girl guide trying to master a reef knot as my cat's cradle turned into a dog's dinner.

My little boy watched with a look of puzzled amusement as mummy tried and failed to produce anything he could recognise out of the 'birthday party' game and a five-pointed star, before stuffing the beautiful rainbow string back into the book and promising him that Granny would show him how to do it. To be fair to this book, the diagrams are clear enough and my failure was no fault of the author.

The other nice aspect here is that the games are collected from around the world and you get the stories to go with them so a tale unfolds as, for instance, you create a sharp knife out of string, soon transforming it into a much-needed bandage!

Pet O'Connell

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