I remember drilling for oil on the moon.

It was a summer play scheme, back in the 70s sometime. It was held at Madeley Court, which was both the local sports centre and a rubbish secondary school. When the high point of a school is that they have access to a dry ski slope, you know that their standards are low. (I am aware that some of my ski-ing friends will disagree). Madeley Court was also the source of the worst bruise that I've ever received that wasn't inflicted by the NHS and related to that, a slight fear of mixed hockey. But that was a couple of years later.

There were a lot of different activities going on at the play-scheme, and I've no idea how or why I chose the one I did; the memory I have starts when I walked into a room. A large, low table was set in a clear space, and an even larger lump of clay on it. I remember that the clay was brown, and smelt very different to dirt; a cleaner, almost clinical smell. Not quite the taste of a petit madeleine, but still easy to bring to mind after all these years. I must have been 8, I think; nearly 9 as it was the summer. The lump of clay was huge; I remember it being larger than I could reach around with both arms, and we were gathered around it by one of the two adults leading this activity.

What's this? she said.

I'm certain that after the requisite delay that occurs when you pose a question to a group of kids who don't know each other and haven't worked out the pecking order yet, and aren't certain that volunteering an answer will result in a duffing up later, someone said 'Clay'.

She smiled.

No, that's what it is. What is it?

And she was laughing, but she was one of those people who knew how to laugh so that you got the joke, rather than thinking that you're being laughed at. I remember her being an adult, i.e. old, and dressed strangely; now I'm certain that she was in her late teens or early twenties, and dressed in that hippy / bohemian style that I really find quite attractive. Who needs psycho-analysis when you have LiveJournal?

But I digress. Eventually, one kid piped up;

It looks like the moon.

And she laughed out loud, and said Yes! That's it! It's the moon! What does the moon look like?

It has craters? one child suggested.

This doesn't have craters, does it? Then she pointed at three of us. Why don't you make some craters on the moon?

It really didn't take a lot more encouragement for three young children to get dirty, so they jumped forward and started digging holes in the clay with their bare hands.

What else does the moon have? she asked.

Rockets!  said one boy, with great enthusiasm, and she pointed at the spoil heaps that were appearing next to the crater-excavators. Show me, she said.

And that was the rest of the afternoon.

We took the clay and we told stories with it - bases were built and occupied by every nation we'd ever heard of, whether they had a space programme or not. Flags were raised and rockets erected. She kept asking us questions, and we answered, and everything we said, we built. I noticed that rockets needed fuel so started building oil rigs and wells and piles of oil drums, heedless of any envionmental consequences - but this was 1977 and I was eight; I'm not sure the environment had made it to Telford by then.

We ended the afternoon covered in splats of clay, with the world our storytelling had built in front of us.

My niece, who is 10, emailed me yesterday, and as part of the conversation said that she preferred English to Crafts at school. She didn't like "making things", she said, but she really liked writing. I can't blame her. In secondry school, I detested Woodwork;  I think my parents still have the fish statue that we all had to carve somewhere. My sisters (my niece's mum) is lithe and graceful - you can imagine it dropping off of its stand and into the water, darting away. Mine is ugly and solid; the sort of fish that we'll only eat when all the pretty ones have become extinct. So I do understand my niece; I hated not being able to transfer what was in my head into solid form. The things I made were never as sleek or graceful as how I could describe them. Never as alive. I never managed it.

Well, except once. The time I built oil wells on the moon.