Colm O'Regan on teddy bears: 'They’re in the attic, waiting. My friends.'

MagicMum's daddy blogger Colm O'Regan on teddy bears…

They’re in the attic, waiting. My friends. Like Sylvester, Angeline, Henry, Panda, Eddie, Teddy, and Pixie.

In case anyone calls the police, I’m talking about my cuddly toys.

A cast assembled slowly over years of Santa visits and also a small one with no name who had been picked up at a fairground. (Not by climbing into the tank and grabbing it Tipperary-style. I won it fair and square after getting my father to pay about three times its retail cost in coins, to grab it with the grabber-thing. )

They’re all male apart from one.

It’s not clear how Angeline (a white rabbit in a gingham dress) got into the mix, but sometimes Santa makes mistakes.

Henry followed the year after, definitely a more male-bearly looking bear. Clearly there had been words said to Santa’s supply chain manager.

Teddy and Pixie were passed down to me from older siblings.

One fella didn’t make the transition to my attic from the past: Nose – a rolled up piece of foam (an ironic term as he didn’t have a nose).

Also gone missing are a series of rags called Tadhgeens (pronounced 'thygeens' for those unaware of the mysteries of the pronunciation of Tadhg) who smelled exactly like me.

I have no idea why my mother or a toddler-me called them Tadhgeen. It’s one of those little mysterious traditions within families that sound bizarre to those outside.

Like Ruby saying goodnight to ‘Mister Greenlight’ the baby monitor.

My ‘friends’ are waiting to see whether they will be called upon again. For the first time in ****ty years, there’s a child in the house and a-cuddling to be done.

And these toys haven’t been given a full-body cuddle in a long time.

But they hang back.

They are elders in suspended animation for decades, like the Grail Knight in the last Indiana Jones movie.

They’re also old-school cuddly toys with hazardous buttons for eyes. So, doe-eyed toys are out until they come up with smart-eyes that can ring an alarm if they become detached.

Anyway, there are other toys doing the job now. A child has only so much cuddle to give.

Our daughter gives us hugs but nothing like the hugs she gives her own cuddly toys.

If you don’t get your squeeze-quota filled from getting a hug from a toddler yourself, there’s always the oxytocin-boost in watching her give a proper Elmyra-from-Animaniacs hug to furry objects who haven’t been compressed this tightly since they were first squashed in a large shipping-box somewhere in Shenzhen Industrial Zone.

We’re not quite at the stage yet where the cuddly toys have to be brought or 'NO ONE’S GOING ANYWHERE', but that can’t be far away.

My daughter does have very definite ideas of who does what around the place.

Each toy has a separate job: One is a day-time dolly which sounds like cockney slang for something rude but just means the doll who doesn’t get brought up the stairs, Dolly, who gets her nappy changed, and Bunny, who gets brought to bed (Ruby and Bunny will wake in the morning and just sit there for a while thinking).

The there's Teddy who gets fed, Koala who gets thrown and Mr Fox who gets laughed at.

It’s a tight-run team. I imagine them giving status updates at the end of each day.

A new arrival is Mary-Ellen a doll who gets cuddled but her hard head is also used to bat the football around the place which is like ad for a campaign against gender stereotyping in toys.

It’s fascinating watch her interact with them.

They* say small children believe that things have an essence or a life force in them.

In 2007, scientists got children to bring in a cuddly toy and then promised to duplicate it using a sort of magic duplicating machine. 

And each time the children went for the original even though there was an identical one next to it.

The scientists reckon think that it’s because children give these objects a life. Just as we get fond of a jalopy of a car or house and ascribe animate qualities to it.

The problem is that I’ve started giving them human feelings so now I’m burdened down with the guilt of knowing I’ve abandoned my childhood friends in the attic plus the knowledge that one day Dolly and Teddy and Bunny and all the others will get left in the attic too.

Anyway better go. I think it’s time for Teddy’s lunch.

*They means an indeterminate group of people who said something about child-rearing. Usually 'They' means: “I thought I remember someone saying it somewhere or was it you said it, I don’t know” but in this case 'They' are proper scientists and have letters after their name and clipboards and white coats and the whole shebang.

Be careful with the use of 'They' when talking to another parent, especially in the sentence “'They’re' saying now that …” .

Despite being well-intentioned, it may come across like: “They’re saying now that the thing you used to do in rearing your child, and thought was a good idea, has been completely discredited and is worse than smoking 20 Rothmans in front of them.”