Gillian Philip

Okay, when I was my children's age we had Father Ted-style Advent Calendars - those ones where you open a wee cardboard door to find a blurred watercolour print of the shepherds, and ask (as did Father Dougal): 'What's that got to do with Christmas then?' 
   Generation Twin has Playmobil calendars (it was this, or chocolate ones resulting in massive morning sugar highs) - Pirate Island for the boy twin, Santa Feeding the Forest Creatures for the girl. These calendars produce a new, very loseable toy every day, building to an attractive Christmas scene. Which was all very nice (apart from the occasional tantrums when the loseable toy got lost), until Christmas Eve's shocker.
   I never thought the Pirates were terribly Christmassy, but I assumed they'd end up in a joyful scene over the festive treasure chest. On the 24th, I slouched blearily through to the kitchen to find Christmas Pirate, little plastic sword raised to behead his little plastic pal (who'd been quietly sleeping in his hammock for 23 days).
   'He's wishing him Happy Christmas,' says son. 'And then he's killing him.'
   It has to be a gender thing. I never found Mrs Fox of the Forest trying to devour Baby Raccoon behind Santa's back. Reading a newspaper article on the Internet today, I found a posted comment insisting that 'Gender is a Mental Attitude'. Uh-huh. Huh huh huh hoo hoo hoo.
   I digress. I was going to talk about small plastic toys. The Advent Calendars are long forgotten, of course, and since Christmas I've been helping create the hugest Mars Mission in the known galaxy. Now, I quite like building these things the first time around, but when something large and heavy falls on the space station, as it inevitably does - splitting it into sub-atomic Lego particles - you can't help praying that something large and heavy will fall on Mr Lego and his fiendish designers.
   Still, I am fond of those teeny fierce Lego men (despite their politically dodgy attitude to green aliens, which they suck up in plastic orange tubes into cryogenic suspension, presumably for some kind of sinister vivisection). I have a soft spot, too, for those unshaven Playmobil pirates. It has to be a plastic thing. Perhaps it's a leftover from my crush on the sinister Captain Black - and he wasn't even CGI in those days, but a somewhat unconvincing puppet. And going by my son's X-Box, Darth Vader as a Lego character is just adorable.
   Or maybe I'm indulging in plastic displacement activity. Who said that word? Who said that word deadline?
   I fear I'm going to miss one. Or, erm, two...