I've heard a lot of stuff about how damaging playing tag is

What on earth is wrong with tag?

Of course, dodgeball was actually one of my favorite games. Unlike kickball, you didn't have students picking teams, which to me was the most humiliating part of PE. And, I was better at it than most sports--I had no hand-eye coordination to speak of, but I was quick and agile.

There were no other kids in walking distance of my house when I was a kid, so I played by myself a lot. My bike was a racehorse, and I laid out courses around the yard to represent the Triple Crown races. My swingset was a spaceship. Extra beanpoles from the garden served as teepee frames, or when broken in half, swords or lightsabers. The woods behind our house served as various imaginary lands, though since my mom is a champion worrier, I could only play there during that fraction of the year that was neither hunting season nor warm enough for rattlesnakes.

You can have a perfect British accent and still sound like an American doing a bad impression because the word usage is wrong and vice versa.

Quite true. Word choice and word order are also good ways of getting down dialect on a page, such that it's not all conveyed with odd spellings and apostrophes and dropped letters. Of course, I still don't know what about drains is so laughable, but I'm willing to let that one go.

I long for those carefree Enid Blyton days when parents would send their kids out to play and not let them back in til supper.

If you'll recall, the kids in Enid Blyton books had this habit of being kidnapped and/or stumbling onto buried treasure someone else would kill to obtain. Twasn't the Ship of A Nice Quiet Day, you know!

We never found any buried treasure... and we looked.

The hardest thing for me posting here is to take the words I know how to use and rearrange them, srunch some up, stretch other bits out and generally throw the whole bunch up into the air and hope that by the time they land they’ll have magically reordered themselves from English to American so that folks can understand what I’m getting at.

Believe it or not, USians are more than capable of understanding UK English. We don't need it translated.

Hil R that sounds like an ideal game for comedy improv.

Probably. Our parents were pretty disturbed when they noticed that we'd gone from playing house and princesses at age 5 to every make-believe game ending in death at age 10.

What on earth is wrong with tag?

It's too elitist. The fastest kids always win. (But really, the only time we played tag by the real rules was when the adults made us do it. Otherwise, we'd change the rules around so that it would be more fun.)

Did anyone else play TV tag? That was where, if the person who was it was about to tag you, you could avoid it by sitting down and shouting out the name of a TV show. Each show could only be used once, though, so if you reused one, you were it. We had to change it to TV/book tag or TV/movie tag sometimes, though, because one family didn't have a TV. (Their parents thought it was bad for the kids' imaginations or something. They eventually got one, with a satelite dish and everything, when the youngest kid was about 15.)

We never found any buried treasure... and we looked.

We did. Granted, this treasure was a rusty suitcase, an empty beer bottle, a plastic harmonica, and a 1923 penny, but it was our treasure. (The suitcase was important because we'd never seen a metal suitcase like that before. The beer bottle was important because it was the only non-broken one we'd ever found in the woods. The harmonica was important because we could use it to make someone's little sister be the court musician for our kingdom. The penny was important because it was really old and the design on the back wasn't the Lincoln Memorial or the wheat design, but something else that we'd never seen before.)

So, the properties that make things important to 9-year-olds: uniqueness, or the ability to be used to torment a younger child.

I loved TV tag.

And I'm surprised that fastest kids always winning is the issue with tag. I expected it to be more like unpopular kids getting ganged up on, or something. Anyway, I still think it's dumb. IMO, as long as you play a variety of games that use different skills over the course of any given week or month, it's a non-issue.

I loved PE in elementary school, except when we had to play soccer, which bored me. (It still does--sorry, un-Americans.) I hated it in middle school, mostly because rapid growth spurts were making me so clumsy.

And I'm surprised that fastest kids always winning is the issue with tag. I expected it to be more like unpopular kids getting ganged up on, or something. Anyway, I still think it's dumb. IMO, as long as you play a variety of games that use different skills over the course of any given week or month, it's a non-issue.

Unpopular kids getting ganged up on is probably an issue, too. For me, that was always more of an issue in kickball, since even with skating I didn't have terribly good leg power. Softball was fun, though, since I was pretty good at hitting, and none of the other kids could ever remember that, so the outfield would always come in when I was up, and I'd be able to hit something that probably would have been an out on the fly if the center fielder was where he was supposed to be, but ended up as a double because he was standing practically on second base and had to run all the way out to get the ball.

My gym teacher in elementary school would never let us race. If we were doing something that required a few kids running from one end of the gym to the other at the same time, and he noticed people saying "I beat you" or whatever, he'd shout out, "This isn't a race! The only race I care about is the human race!"

The penny was important because it was really old and the design on the back wasn't the Lincoln Memorial or the wheat design, but something else that we'd never seen before.)

The old design was wheat sheaves from 1909 until they changed it in 1959. You sure it wasn't something else, like a Mercury dime?

I'm laughing my arse off at the idea of having to translate Britishisms in order that (say) Betsy, Erin and Dr T can figure out the fancy Limey words...