Tenses I find that I don't know tenses quite well, so I'm going to write about the old days and practice tenses in the meantime. When I was little, the worst thing I had ever known was to be bored. In those days I spent most of my time at home, since my parents were busy and no one could watch[1] me and my brother after school. What was worse, our father hated toys (he was and still is a serious man), so we had to invent our own. We were big fans of drawing maps. We created our own continents, countries and cities on paper, and then gave names to them. We would look in the dictionary to find some complicated (and good-looking) characters and wrote down on our maps. God knows how much fun had (or have?) we had from this silly game. [1] I used "look after" at first, but then I thought maybe it's little babies that we "look after". We were students already, so maybe "watch" is the right word to use?