Play with those toys!

I love toyshops. Walk in, sigh, feel right at home. And the best ones have all sorts of strange, odd, funny-looking things you can't figure out. My daughter and I say, "Look at this", "Try this" and we press buttons and play with things. I know it may irritate some store owners, but the most successful stores have their employees playing with the demonstration model of the toy - for very good reason! In any toystore, at any time of day, you will see parents and grandparents staring blankly at the box of an airplane, helicopter, robot, transformer etc and they look up, catch your eye and say "I don't know what this is. How does it work?" We chat about the toy and if they are brave enough, they collar a member of staff who also usually looks at the toy and turns the box over to find the brief English description among all the other languages on the back.

My sister and I walked through all the floors of Hamleys in London, watching all the toy testers playing with toys, enticing Christmas shoppers. Who doesn't revert to childhood in a toystore? Was it you pressing the buttons on the dinosaurs as you walked past? Then hearing the roars? Woah, cool! Now about the helicopter-speedboat-transformer - what does it really do? Can we find a 10-year old and ask?