Strangers click at the Lego club for over-50s
LOS ANGELES: In a room that used to be a gift shop just down the road from Archway station in north London, seven women between the ages of 59 and 80 are pretending to be happy to talk to me.
They’re pretending because they’d much rather be getting on with the task in hand. This is, after all, the over-50s Lego club — and Lego doesn’t build itself.
Brenda, who is in the early stages of a 4,000-piece Disney Castle, has only missed two weeks in the five years since the club began. The fact that she is softly spoken is a cover, I soon realise, for a no-nonsense approach to old age.
She turned 80 this year “but the number is not my problem. When some people retire, they just sit at home and watch TV. I live my life as best I can from day to day.”
Day to day might start with an exercise class at 10am, an hour in the library until water aerobics at midday and then, on Tuesdays, a history walking tour around Caledonian Park with “a nice young man from Arsenal”.
On afternoons and weekends, she helps out with her two great-grand nieces but it’s Lego club, for three hours every Thursday, that’s the highlight of the week.
“I’m from a very close-knit family and the bond is the same here,” she says. “I did not expect to get what I get from it. It’s not just about the Lego. If there’s something wrong with my phone or my laptop, Huw will find time to help me. All the young people here are so helpful and pleasant and that gives you courage to keep going.”
Huw Steer, 30, is the Lego co-ordinator at the Toy Project, a charity which began by accident 12 years ago when Jane Garfield, then a primary school teacher, decided to do something for deprived children in the area. “Because as a teacher, you see children sitting next to each other in school,” she tells me, “and some of them might have been to the Bahamas for Christmas and some might not have left their front door. Some will say ‘Santa bought me an iPad’ and the other kids will wonder why he didn’t bring them anything at all.”
What began with Jane redistributing donated toys from her home has evolved into an Aladdin’s cave of a charity toy shop five doors down from the Lego club space and another in Selfridges, no less, on Oxford Street. Lego, among many other things, is donated, often in mixed bags or by the bootload, and it is Huw’s arduous task to separate or reverse-build them back into their original sets. He then runs a full diary of Lego clubs — for children, for adults, for oldies and one that pairs children with OAPs “so they can learn about each other”.
I ask him how the over-50s compare with the other clubs and he says none of them had played with Lego when they were children but they’ve all become experts. “I have to find the more complex sets — Lego Architecture and Lego Technic — to keep them busy,” he says.
Carmen also turned 80 this year — “I don’t feel any different” — and has also been coming to Lego club since the beginning. “I had an operation on my hand and lost sensation,” she says. “I couldn’t even pick a glass up. My daughter thought this might help and it has. It’s lovely.” She is building some kind of Lego chalet which, although this isn’t a competition, will be dwarfed by the set one table along.
Kulsum and Mariam, a retired pharmacist and a retired accountant — niece and aunt — both in their seventies, are working in tandem to complete the 5,923-piece Lego Taj Mahal. Mariam, who had a stroke four years ago, finds Lego rehabilitative. Today, she finds the next pieces while Kulsum, who makes a three-hour round trip from Watford each week to be here, puts those pieces together. “It’s a very romantic building,” says Kulsum as she adds another brick.
“You can’t rush Lego,” says Kim, the youngest member at 59. “You have to slow down and it’s not just slowing down your hands. It slows down your thoughts. It puts you in a calmer state.” Kim has fibromyalgia and the Lego not only takes her mind off the pain but it also helps with the “fibrofog”.
While others may come here for the friendship, she also comes here for the peace and quiet. Both her one-year-old grandchildren are living with her and her husband at the moment but Lego club is her time and “it’s very relaxing”.
By the end of the session, I’m looking forward to retirement but the advice Brenda and her fellow Lego enthusiasts all give me is clear: you have to keep busy. That is why the over-50s Lego club is one of more than 270 events listed on Kissing it Better’s Islington calendar.
The charity’s goal is to end the isolation of old age and one of the ways it is doing that is by producing and distributing calendars of suitable events in local areas. There are currently ten calendars covering Wiltshire, Somerset, Birmingham, parts of London and more.
As Brenda says more than once, you can’t just sit at home watching daytime TV. I’m far too afraid to tell her that’s the part I’m looking forward to.