David Beckham’s not the only dad to play at king of the castle
Bleary-eyed but glowing with pride, David Beckham exudes the air of exhausted achievement normally associated with a new birth.
And while he has not actually produced a baby, he is clearly delighted with the creation that has kept him up till 1am: a Lego castle that he has spent the past six days constructing for his six-year-old daughter, Harper, all 4,000 pieces of it, complete with a 490-page instruction booklet.
Since he earns around £71,000 a day, that works out at one expensive castle, costing nearly half a million pounds worth of David’s labour.
No doubt Harper will enjoy playing with it, as long as Daddy lets her. And in any case, she has missed out on the whole point of a Lego toy – building it.
To be fair to Beckham, he is following a time-honoured tradition of middle-aged fathers who buy their children toys that they secretly, or subconsciously, want to play with themselves.
Back in the Seventies, my husband Guy remembers his railway-enthusiast father buying him a Lego trainset, which he then spent hours constructing, lying prostrate on the playroom floor, setting up routes and signals systems.
“He wanted us to do it together, so he didn’t actually stop me helping, but he was very much in charge. It was clear that he wished he’d had Lego as a child. He loved it. I just used to sit there and watch him.
“It was the same when he brought out his old Hornby railway set: he really wanted us to play with it together, but he had very set ideas on where everything should go, so I just let him get on with it.”
Guy then repeated history by buying a remote control helicopter – a step up from the remote-control cars he used to play with when he was a child – ostensibly for our then six-year-old son William.
Keen as William was to get his hands on the controller, his father was reluctant to relinquish it – “I’ll just show you one more time.” When he did eventually hand it over, only for it to fly, fatally, into the washing line, he was crestfallen.
And that’s the conundrum. Fathers yearn for their children to share their passion, be it railway sets, Rubik’s cubes or drones, but then they tend to get immersed and even obsessive.
As one father explains: “Building a Lego castle or wooden Tower Bridge serves no purpose, but it’s very meditative and tremendously satisfying when it’s finished. Most of us don’t get the chance to construct anything in our daily lives – apart from DIY, which is dull and difficult. Toys give us a chance to regress in a healthy way, which is probably why we end up hogging them.”
It is worse when fathers excitedly anticipate sharing a game or toy they used to love with their own children, but then find that they fail to share his enthusiasm.
A friend who adored Meccano looked forward to constructing cars and robots with his own children, but to his disappointment they found it tedious, preferring the video game Minecraft, with its endless possibilities – and the fact that Dad was not dexterous or interested enough to take over.
Mothers are not immune to interfering either. Some will admit to secretly rearranging the furniture in the dolls’ house in the dead of night. It seems there is a – somewhat bossy – child in all of us. Perhaps, in future, manufacturers should acknowledge reality and label their toys: “For aged six to 56.”