Nostalgia for a childhood I never had

A find in a bag being taken to the Salvation Army: A tangle of cables, several electronic components, two pads with buttons on them. A glimmer of the outmoded.

A financial transaction: Change obtained for a $20, directionless small-talk, the exchange of some of the money for a plastic case containing a plastic cartridge.

An assembly: Cords snaking this way and that from a table, the insertion of the cartridge, nervous pressing of buttons. A blue screen. Some more fiddling with buttons. Static. More buttons. More static. And finally to channel seven, which displayed:

Two smirkingly anthropomorphic woodland creatures, a tranquil island background, and the words: "SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2".

Harry and I had been testing an ancient Sega Megadrive system, a relic from the early 90s. We never had any videogames ourselves, other than crudely rendered early Macintosh games (Specter Supreme, anyone? How about Cosmic Osmo?) and (later on) pirated copies of the Diablo games and the quasi-educational Age of Empires. But when we we lived in Nigeria in the heyday of the early Nintendo and Sega systems, we would see them played. (And occasionally join in ourselves - I was horrible at it.)

The screen flickered and the colors seemed slightly too bright. Presumably the symptom of decrepit components. We huddled in front of the box, Harry standing, me sitting, and we directed the shimmering figures left, then right, then up and forward, forward into the past.