Reading this thread makes me feel bloody ancient.
My first Lego set was a garage/petrol station. It seems to be a combination of two sets listed on Peeron it had a VW Beetle and a Petrol Tanker. If I still had the Beetle it would apparently be worth about 150 US dollars a ridiculous price!
My then teenage uncle gave me all of his Lego which amounted to about a biscuit tin's worth of bricks.
In those days Lego used to sell small pocket money sized boxes of about half a dozen different bricks and I got one a week for years, plus god knows how many sets that were just thrown into the box my dad made for me. It had a different compartment for each colour, not that there were that many different colours available at that time!
Minifigs weren't even dreamed of then so we made men out of a white 2x1 brick for the head on top of a a coloured one for the body. At that sort of scale you could make some pretty huge models. The castles I made were built using a minimum of 2x8 bricks for the walls, so they were a lot more realistic than the (what I consider <insert that tiresome argument>) system stuff that came along later.
Lego then produced the first of the minifigs without separate arms or legs, then eventually the minifig as most people know and love them. The only drawback to their introduction was that you would need a vastly greater number of bricks to build something on their scale.
This meant that the good old box of bricks was consigned to history and I stopped actually buying Lego for a while especially as Lego started producing the <insert that tiresome argument> special bricks. I finally relented when the Pirate range was released. The minifigs and ship hulls made up for the not even one stud thick walls that were used for the Imperial fort and the island tower. I bought loads of stuff purely for the minifigs and thus acquired the beginnings of an army.
With the birth of a daughter I couldn't really justify buying Lego for a few years, until a visit to Legoland Windsor with her nursery school. I saved some cash and thought I could splash out on a load of Pirate sets only to find that they had scrapped the range. I had missed out on the introduction of the Red tuniced soldiers and the anachronistic morion helmeted 'Spanish'.
My daughter got into the cowboy theme for a while, but the arrival of further children on an erratic but sort of regular basis put paid to further Lego purchases, meaning I missed out on the Legends re-releases as well.
I am now scouring eBay and bricklink for odds and sods to put into the collection to be able to build more pirate ships for my son who is obsessed with the whole idea. At the same time I am trying to find more 'Blue coat' Imperials to build up my Fantasian Army at the same time.
