“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That perennial funeral favourite, 1 Corinthians 13, has a lot to answer for. Generations of so-called grown-ups have, whether through the fear of God or the fear of embarrassment, done all they can to distance themselves from anything that they fear the neighbours or the man upstairs will think is childish.
If you don’t like painting Warhammer figurines or building Lego or collecting Funko models, nobody’s making you
Now, only two thousand years later, the tide seems to be turning. No less grown-up an outlet that the Financial Times reports that a great boom is underway in the so-called “kidult market”. Toy companies are actively chasing the over-18s who have the self-confidence to buy toys for themselves. “Hasbro now courts grown-up collectors, Mattel has launched an adult ‘brick shop’ to build elaborate Hot Wheels cars and ‘throwback collections’ of American Girl dolls from the 1980s and 1990s.” Adult Fans of Lego, aka AFOLs, constitute a growing market; Games Workshop, which sells miniature figures for tabletop battle games, has seen its share price go up by 3,000 per cent: “adults are hoovering up toys at a rate that has forced the whole industry to rethink its customer base”.
Good. Just as the worst bores and philistines are the ones who police the boundaries between high art and popular culture – joyless, shrivelled souls for whom art and literature are designed to shore up social status rather than give pleasure and surprise and delight – the people who make most of adulthood are those whose grasp on it is most tenuous. They are to the “grown-up” as Andrew Tate is to masculinity.
As I note in my recent book The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (out in reasonably-priced paperback this very week, by happy chance), the distinction between children’s stories and the grown-up sort has seldom been insisted on by authors – Alan Garner and Philip Pullman and TH White refused to reduce their work thus – and barely existed much before the twentieth century. Grimm’s Tales were not collected for children; the audience for Peter Pan or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were – given their themes and their artistic complexity – far from restricted to kids.
So it is with toys and collections and play. You may think you’re very grown-up, as you amass Victorian stamps or pre-Raphaelite sketches or classic cars, tinker with woodworking in your man-cave or insist that what you’re playing isn’t a game but a sport – but what you’re doing is what children do. “They’re not dolls!” you may shriek when your wife winds you up. “They’re valuable collectibles!” But you shriek in vain. You’re finding pleasure and diversion, or acquiring a skill, in something essentially pointless.
That is a great hedge against those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Two wise sayings. One, Kurt Vonnegut: “I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Two, the collective wisdom of the internet: “Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.” If you don’t like painting Warhammer figurines or building Lego or collecting Funko models, nobody’s making you. And if you categorically refuse to engage with graphic storytelling or videogames, for that matter, the only person missing out on a broad and interesting area of the culture is you.
Our own chief book reviewer Philip Hensher – a man of unquestioned erudition and sophisticated taste – has written in these very pages about his love of Lego, rekindled by the company issuing a set that made Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater available to build for the proverbial little engineers. Quite right too. I’m not ashamed to admit I am less high-minded than Philip, but a few years ago when this magazine gave staff a Christmas present in the form of an Amazon voucher, I spent mine on a Lego model of the Avengers Quinjet, and I have seldom spent a happier morning than the one I devoted to assembling it.
What’s more, games and play are wired into the history of human progress. Steven Johnson’s Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World is one of many books – only this year we’ve seen contributions by Tim Clare and Kelly Clancy – that have made the painstaking case that mucking about and having fun has had a central role in the history of our cultural and technological evolution. Game theory, for that matter, may even have saved us from extinction.
I think, in this context, of the great Rod Stewart, who makes no secret whatever of his love for model railways. He has, he reports in his peerless autobiography, a vast layout on one floor of his house. He’s still a little in the grip of Corinthians – he makes haste to declare that “there is no wearing of peaked caps, waving of flags or blowing of whistles. Furthermore, anyone found in the vicinity of the layout making train noises will find themselves forcibly ejected …” – but I see him as essentially on the right side of the argument.
Heaven, as Wordsworth had it, lay about us in our infancy. There’s really no need on earth or in any other realm to put away childish things.
Comments