Days Of Black Figures

Finally I have it! It is in my sweaty paws like a withered cadaver that has stopped rotting and been born again. Long and bloody have the years been since last I drummed out a game from it but now its back and I intend to sink into pints of dark mild beer and attempt to rekindle an old memory.
What is it? I hear you asking, what is this magic that seems to have etched a grin onto this writers normally death's head chops? Well its a ZX Spectrum 48k computer. *Sound of high anticipation falling to the floor like stale jelly* And I feel somewhat revived; rejuvenated from a grim coma that has hung about my shoulders, earnestly picking at strips of joy.
It must be a slight case of madness because I press the familiar rubber keys on the computer, willing my 11 year old self to appear like mephistopholes from the dust. I read some of the blurb in a booklet that came with Sinclair's old gem, boasting of 'top quality graphics' printed over two decades ago from a time when Space Invaders was todays Modern Warfare 2.
The Spectrum is lighter than I remembered but the small band of rainbow colours on the bottom right corner bring the full force of memories back, nestling into my mind like lost cubs suddenly found a home.
Another thing that catapulted me back into the mists of time was the tape recorder that came with it. It was exactly the same model as I had owned in 1981 and bought at Boot's (which if im not mistaken was where my mother had purchased my original recorder). Spirit of Christmas come to visit indeed.
People forget how easy it is to play videogames these days. Simply pop the disc into the console and one is almost instantaneously whisked off to the game world. Not so with the Speccy and other computers from that garish era. Software came in the form of cassettes and before playing any games the tape recorder had to be plugged into the Spectrum and the cassette game loaded which took the best part of ten minutes. Thats if it loaded at all on the first load, it sometimes took three or four attempts.
Another thing to vex the soul was tuning in the computer to an available channel on the television. I had forgotten how testing it could be as I tried to fine tune the picture showing the white Sinclair home screen. It seemed as if the machine was stubbornly holding back its best picture quality until I found the channel number of its exact choosing.
But to be honest none of the annoying aspects of retro gaming bothered me even as the back of the television had a waterfall of black knotted leads. As a young lad on Christmas day, sipping on a pint of mild ale (my one pint ration) and stabbing Russians as a Green Beret in games publisher Imagines classic title I was in utter bliss. And so it will be again twenty eight years later I have determined.