The magic toyshop

Since I was a little kid I always found it exciting that I had an uncle who owned a toyshop. In the kid retail universe, toyshops are only a fairly short rung below sweetshops in terms of outright awesomeness. But the problem was that the uncle in question--Jim--lived in Melbourne. This meant that, apart from one holiday when I was five, I never got to visit Boy and Girl again until my childhood was far behind me.

This past weekend we went down to Melbourne with my mum and Anya and I got, vicariously, the experience I'd been missing out on. There were brightly-coloured windmills, ceramic animal figures, wonderful sculptural weighted toys (my aunt Astrid gave Anya one of them, a red clown sat astride a blue-and-yellow ball which contrives to always remain upright as it wheels about the room). Best of all, a sort of wooden pine tree with big flat multicoloured leaves forming a spiral ladder, which rang out musically when you dropped a marble down it. Even the blowing bubbles were superior: on touching the ground, instead of bursting they mostly just stuck, giving Anya the chance to go up to them, burst them with one thrust-out index finger, and delightedly declare "bub-aows!"

We got back to Sydney last night, after a wonderful weekend with Astrid, Jim, and his partner Robert. Our bags are laden with toys, and one last one--a ridable bee on castors, which Anya was kicking away on and mum very generously bought her as a Christmas present--will follow in the post. I'm hoping we can come down again soon to stock up some more.

(Attentive readers will have noted that the actual Angela Carter novel "The Magic Toyshop", is actually a bit horrible and more grimy and odd than magical. But I like the title so it stays.)