Opinion

Anita Robinson: A unicorn is for life - not just for Christmas

You may not have realised it, but 2018 is the year of the unicorn
You may not have realised it, but 2018 is the year of the unicorn You may not have realised it, but 2018 is the year of the unicorn

A mere 26 weeks before Christmas comes a list of this year's 'must have' toys.

Unicorns are big this year - and expensive. Pray that your offspring don't write to Santa demanding 'My Lovely Electric Ride-On Unicorn' at an eye-watering £230.

Pick of the mythical beasties, at £50, is the aptly named Poopsie Unicorn Surprise which, if fed with glitter at one end, obligingly excretes sparkly poo at the other. Who thought that one up? And got it marketed?

I'm relieved to see the natural maternal instincts of little girls catered for still by the Tiny Treasures doll, described as "looking and smelling just like a real baby".

Really? To the best of my recollection, babies are only intermittently fragrant. Certainly, mine was.

Despite the current hoo-hah over the place of women in society, the toy-making trade remains fixated on the 'little princess' principle.

The pink pocket money market is awash with a plethora of juvenile beauty aids for hair, nails, lips and eyes, directed at the under-10s, happily colluding in the invidious myth that how a pre-pubescent girl looks is more important than what she is as a person.

The list goes on: Boxer, the mischievous robot; Paw Patrol Rescue Fire Truck; assorted dinosaurs at £17 each - and a £40 cage to keep them in. Like they'll escape?

There's a heavy emphasis on interactive items. I presume that means they 'do' things.

Good old Lego is still on the go - this time an £85 chance to build an Arctic Mobile Exploration Base. By now, Lego has exhausted every other architectural option.

Many of these popular ready-made choices are a bit prescriptive. Where's the opportunity for imagination and creativity?

In my mixed infants classroom was a big box of plain polished beechwood blocks of various shapes and sizes.

Out of it came forts and farms, bridges and towers, ramps and racing tracks, put together with intense concentration, co-operation, argument and arbitration - all without reference to any illustrated book of instructions.

The more elaborately complete a toy, the less scope it offers for the development of what our children need most - creativity, imagination and the skills of problem-solving.

Play with sand, water, clay and paint, planting, growing, exploring and investigating, dressing up and role-playing, the whole gamut of activities that develop these faculties have become, by default, almost exclusively the province of playgroups nurseries and reception classes.

Working - and house proud - parents, strapped for time and space are missing a significant developmental stage of their child's motor and language skills.

In an era of crèches and childminders, 'parents as primary educators' of the very young is a defunct concept. Who learns anything at their mother's knee these days?

While I'm all for keeping the fast-diminishing magic in an all too crassly commercial Christmas, should you be tardy in ordering your unicorn well in advance and have to spend most of Advent trawling the province to no avail for what are - due to their absence in shops - entirely mythical beasts, here is your alibi, abridged from 'Unicorns! Unicorns!' by Geraldine McCaughrean, published by Orchard Books.

"When God flooded the earth, Noah called all the animals to the ark. Through the driving rain they came, some quickly, some slowly," she writes.

"The unicorns, gentle and kind, stopped to help the slow tortoises through the rising water, the deer, trapped in mud, the butterflies stricken by icy rain, the monkeys fooling about in the trees.

"All made it safely to the ark. But the unicorns' kindness was their undoing.

"The ark was already afloat and Noah had no option but to raise the gangplank and bolt the door.

"The floodwaters turned the ark around; the winds blew it on its way. The unicorns, swimming now, beat upon its planks with their hooves, but nobody heard them above the thunder.

"All night Noah and the animals wept because the unicorns were lost to the world forever. But out at sea on a stormy day you can see them still, dancing on the wavetops - a fleet of white horses.

"And though they race for dry land, they somehow never reach it..."

All together now: "Awww..."