It Just Keeps on Bouncing. Our Cotton-and-Latex Beach Ball.

Beach balls have long been top of the pops for four- and five-year-olds. Fatter and softer than, say, tennis balls, they bounce just as high, but more slowly. They give a kind of feeling of security that small children like – and, the great thing, you can take them into the water. However, there’s always been a snag: the material they’re usually made of, PVC, is both uncomfortably slippery and perishable – ‘one-summer’ balls in fact! The inventive North Germans have found an alternative: a beach ball with a second outer skin made of cotton, 35 cm in diameter when fully inflated. The cotton surface gives the ball a delightfully soft and ‘grippy’ feel, and, when stretched, it absorbs so little water that it’s hardly heavier in the sea than on the beach.

Ball Games. Summer’s back!

Now the clouds have rolled back and the sun has reported for duty (nice one!), families have started searching for last summer’s bats, racquets, balls, nets and poles. The fact that they’ve disappeared is often not so much due to the gremlins that hide in garages, lifts or other storage places than to the simple fact that they were probably just thrown away or abandoned – shoddy and unloved. Here are our alternatives – quality, and worth keeping till next summer!