Whatever the reason might be, I – 41 (and a half) year-old Homo sapiens, love toys.

Perhaps there’s some kind of retrospective replacement retail therapy going on, something which I cannot fix with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, or maybe I’m just happy that my son and I can share a morning spent clicking lengths of Scalextric track together (around his younger brother, under the coffee table around the chair leg and over the train track of course).

As I sit in the kaleidoscope of light beaming through our south-facing window, Fireman Sam lies motionless, awaiting his own rescue after taking a high velocity hit from an airborne Finn McMissile. Percy must be bracing himself: he’s next into the Tokyo Spinout Super Cascade Crossover Trackset (and we’ve prepared him a launch Mr Lightyear himself would be proud of). The imagination can go just as beyond Buzz’s ultimate destiny. So much fun to be had, but you don’t always need toys to be this creative.

Let me paraphrase: sometimes you have to be creative because you can’t get the blinking toy out of the dastardly display case. Please note, I did not say ‘box’. Boxes are what toys used to come in. It was our pre-digital plug and play; our very own ‘rip-and-go’. Here I am now, reliving my past – sharing my son’s present – sharing his presents. But I’m struggling to prise a plastic object away from the very thing that attracted me to it – correction: my son to it.

Make no mistake, I can take the front of a Porsche 997 apart, rip out its windscreen and successfully put the car back together again with a shiny, brand new glass shield in place. Oh, I’m skilled. My Meccano spanner has been replaced with a full set of Chrome Vanadium wrenches. I’m a journeyman technician and my skills began by building blocks, looking up Lego; my ability to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct was ameliorated by assembling Airfix aeroplanes from complex kits of moulded plastic. I’m quite hands-on. I don’t need instructions (well, definitely not to start with). I’m a man’s man. But since when did we need tools to remove toys from cartons?

With my mechanical brain and entrepreneurial mindset, I’m currently working on the design of a tool that:

a)      Can deftly remove the subject toy from its display case within a tenth of the time it is currently taking;

b)      Can safely remove the subject toy from its display case within a tenth of the time it is currently taking without showing my child how not to use a pair of kitchen scissors.

c)       Can carefully remove the subject toy from its display case within a tenth of the time it is currently taking without showing my child how not to use a pair of kitchen scissors without damaging the toy, the kitchen scissors, me or my excited and impatient child.