Making your childhood dreams come true

I am very disappointed. A lifetime of twee kids movies and self-help books had led me to believe that, if I worked hard enough and truly, really-truly, believed with all my heart, that my childhood dreams would come true. I too could get an all-smiles freeze frame shot with my whole family and a jaunty little tune over the credits.

And have they come true? Have they what?

I have tried for years, man and boy, to make the swing go all the way over. It was the classic boyhood dream that one day I'd be strong enough to lean back super-hard on those chains and make the swing go so fast that it would loop right up and over and I would come screaming down the other side - the envy of all I surveyed. And it hasn't happened. No matter how big and tall I've become, how many of my greens I've eaten, it just won't work. I get to almost horizontal, the chain goes slack and my dreams sag with it.

And while we're talking about flying, I've never managed to get into space. My homemade rocket boosters - thoughtfully built using recycled materials such as toilet rolls and cotton wool with a touch of metho - did nothing. Not even so much as a creditable disaster on the launch pad. Absolutely nothing. So I upgraded the tube to empty paint cans, nailed onto the back of the cubby. Orbit? No. On reflection, it may be as well that this particular dream didn't work because my life-support system consisted mainly of a purloined length of garden hose but the principle remains! It was my childhood dream. And it hasn't come true. Even as a grown-up, I can't get the damn cubby-house off the ground.

Nor the car. Sitting in the middle of the back seat as a kid, I knew I was on a runway. The night was dark, the headlights illuminated the morse-code lines down the middle of the road and the runway edges were marked in flashing red and white. If dad would only pull back hard enough on that steering wheel we were absolutely going to fly all the way home. The only reason it didn't work was that dad just wasn't trying hard enough. Or so I thought. I am the dad now and, try as I might, I just can't get the DeLorean effect. Another one bites the dust.

2015 is next year, by the way. The bloody car companies have some serious R&D to get done.

If I couldn't get to the sky, the next dream involved getting the sky to come to me. I could attract lightning! My parents, dream killers that they are, were less than keen to provide me with a key and a kite so I had to work out my own plan. Metal attracts lightning so the more metal you have, the more likely you are to get yourself killed. So, get as much as possible. Lots and lots of nails hammered into a block of wood and stuck out in the rain? Rust. An old pineapple tin cut down the sides and opened up to look like a receiving dish then nailed to a block of wood? More rust. What's a boy got to do? Trees could do it all by themselves with no metal. I worked and believed my little heart out and not so much as a tingling feeling on the end of my tongue.

I was lied to. Were you?