P is for Paper Pictures, Prizes, Puzzles and Piscine Pronouncements

The really cheap end of a really cheap corner of the really cheap arm of the same industry that brings you your Airfix kits, your Hornby model railways, your Britains farm, your Monopoly and your Schlich for Revell 'Epix' warriors is here. A bit of printed paper could do the same job as any other plaything, keep junior happy or quiet (or both!) for half an hour or half a day!

I would imagine that the house which doesn't have a pack of these somewhere in a drawer is a rare house indeed, newsprint paper with fluffy edges, you can't shuffle them and getting them out of their pack results in bent and dog-eared cards in seconds.

Fortune telling fish, and why not! They used to be printed to look like a fish (left), now they are just a scrap of red celluloid (right), do they work? (wrong).

The trick 'mystery calculator', clever numbers, it's why I hate them! Small puzzles (this one a Halloween specific capsule toy), Kinder loves these, books of water-slide 'tattoos'...or tatoos even! And a joke book illustrated with thumbnails smaller than er...thumbnails!