Bricking It

This blog, picture-making, and indeed pretty much everything else have been sitting sulking on the back seat (or simmering on the back burner) for a while, as this past week has been LEGO™ Week, something I've been putting off for months. It's been quite enjoyable, though, rattling and riffling through many boxes of plastic bricks, looking for just the right piece, and quite therapeutic, too, like doing an enormous 3D jigsaw puzzle. No, I haven't lost my marbles, although it does seem that I am, in certain cases, several bricks short of a set. I'd better explain.

For many years our son, like so many children of his generation born in the 1980s and 90s – that is, before the internet and gaming swept most conventional toys into the attic – was a LEGO fanatic [1]. Christmas? Birthdays? Visit from doting grandparents? There was never really any question of what he would want: in fact, he was generally able to supply the precise catalogue number of the desirable sets.

Older readers who have not been parents may be thinking: huh? Lego, to anyone over 50, means a box of clunky red, white, blue, and yellow bricks of various sizes, that combined well enough in the hands of a 5-year-old to build things composed of right angles and flat surfaces, like houses or ... well, just houses, really. Anything naturally curvilinear could only be approximated in a deeply unsatisfactory way that prefigured the pixelated "jaggies" of the early days of digital imaging. But Lego in the late 20th century underwent a dramatic reconfiguration that transformed the product from a superior but limited toddlers' construction set to a must-have pastime for children around the crucial pre-teen, toy-buying age of 8-12. Mainly boys, it has to be said, although some lame, rather stereotyped "pink princess" attempts were made to attract girls. Incredibly, Lego became cool.

Someone at Lego Central was, it has to be said, a genius of marketing. Sets were now themed, packaged robustly and attractively, consistently branded, and with photographic box-art, in much the same way that upmarket plastic model construction kits have always been, but with the addition on the more expensive sets of gatefold lids, opening onto transparent windows giving a peek at the contents. Alliances were forged with certain key major brands – Star Wars, for example, and later Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter – and not entirely dissimilar lines of own-brand equivalents were developed, each with its own distinctive livery. If you were after a particular theme – explorers, say, or pirates – you could spot the sets on the shelf right away. Thematic sets were pitched at different price points, ranging from what you might call luxury "Christmas" items – big two-to-three foot boxes, containing several large vehicles, a shaped base, and a number of characters equipped with weapons and paraphernalia designed to be held in the famously fingerless Lego mitten hand – to small, four-inch "pocket money" sets with just a single person and a few bricks and pieces.

Crucial to all this was the creation of specially moulded, non-brick pieces, often unique to a particular range or even box, which disrupted the essentially rectilinear nature of the Lego system, but were still consistent with and swappable within it. Rockets, cars, spooky castles with trapdoors, and elaborate machineries of death and destruction became possible. Even the little Lego people acquired cartoonish personalities, with beards, moustaches, stubble, and stylised macho snarls and smirks printed onto the standard yellow, barrel-shaped head, and various outfits and uniforms printed onto the bodies (did I mention Lego is mainly targeted at boys? [2]). Not to mention swappable hair-pieces, hats, and helmets; pirates, for example, got a variety of  peg-legs and hooks to replace the standard-issue legs and hands. Brilliantly, however, and quite unlike most model construction kits, there has never been any suggestion in the box illustrations that you are buying a representation of the real world, no pretence that a Lego ninja warrior or astronaut looks anything like a human being: the Lego-ness of Lego World is sold and celebrated with a practically post-modern degree of irony. Indeed, the Lego computer games and even movies (no, really) of more recent years are relentlessly and tiresomely knowing and in-jokey about the nature and limitations of Lego. But for an imaginative ten-year-old boy, capable of close concentration, delayed gratification, and a certain level of suspension of disbelief, this is a winning formula.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we have an awful lot of Lego in what used to be our son's bedroom, and in order to make a start on repairing and redecorating the real-life cracked plaster, water-stained ceiling, and general shabbiness of the room it all needs to be gathered together and disposed of to a charity shop [3]. Which is a problem, because the whole point of Lego is that it is a "system" toy: every bit can be recombined with every other bit, creating new scenarios, vehicles, and people. And, over the years, has been. Which is the challenge I now face.

I suppose I could simply fill a few large rubble sacks with random bricks and bits and hand them over to Oxfam, in a  Lego version of "kill them all, and let God sort them out". But the public-spirited, orderly librarian in me won't allow that. Where the boxes and instructions have survived, I am determined to reconstruct them, then disassemble and re-bag the pieces, so that some other child can have the pleasure of playing with them just as Lego intended. Hence LEGO™ Week, which shows every sign of becoming Lego Month.

Anyone seen a loose black ninja hat? Or a flat yellow square tile, with a rotating grey centre?

1. Hereafter "Lego". Too shouty, all in caps...
2. I notice that my daughter, who is keen on film, has radically regendered the camera operators and directors (originally all male) in a couple of "Lego Movies" sets, simply by removing and replacing the heads.
3. It's possible, I suppose, that some of the sets may now be sought after and valuable, but I think we've had our money's worth out of them, several times over.