Build-a-Bear Workshops are like crack dens for five-year-olds

My son Ludo will be celebrating his fifth birthday this weekend with a party at the Build-a-Bear workshop in Westfield. Those of you who don’t have a small child will be blissfully ignorant of this new fad. Build-a-Bear Workshop is a toyshop-cum-factory in which children can construct their very own teddy bears from scratch. The stand-alone stuffed animal isn’t too expensive — they start at £9 — but add accessories and the price ratchets up. For instance, a Pink Beararmoire® Fashion Case is £24 — and Ludo is very keen on fashion.

Caroline and I used to pride ourselves on not letting our children become too attached to their stuffed animals or blankets. We know the trouble they can cause. Take the summer before last, when I invited John Cassidy, a New York-based journalist, to come and stay in the Hamptons with his wife and children. No sooner had he arrived than he discovered his eldest daughter had left a beloved toy animal in the 7/11 they’d stopped at on the way. Trouble is, John couldn’t remember which town it was in. So he was forced to spend the next 48 hours calling up every 7/11 between Manhattan and Sag Harbor trying to discover if the wretched creature had been handed in.

Blankets are even worse. Not only do children become surgically attached to them, but they won’t let their parents wash them. The upshot is they’re often in a disgusting state — a breeding ground for all kinds of bacteria. If the UN Weapons Inspectors had uncovered a cache of children’s ‘blankies’ in Iraq, George Bush and Tony Blair would have had no problem proving that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Caroline and I had what we thought of as an ‘enlightened’ approach to these keepsakes.