Children at play

You just don't find them in the pink aisle, is all.

In fact, pink was the manly colour for little boys until the 19^th century, when suddenly it became all girlie. And thanks to QI for this quite interesting information.

The other day, a friend described the toys her great-niece had received for Christmas. Besides being suitably shocked at how many gifts this child got, what really attracted my attention was the description of the toddler's favourite – a toy toaster.

'She was bored with everything else very quickly. But that toaster – she watched the toast pop up over and over and over!'

She looked at me. 'It could have been a Jack-in-the-box, really.'

Certainly it could. But someone will assume this small child is fascinated by the toaster because, as a girl, she must naturally be fascinated by domestic appliances.

But I think she is simply fascinated by highly-coloured objects that fly out of other highly-coloured objects, possibly with a funny noise.

It is high time we looked at definitions and how they mould our understanding. And it's time to discuss and understand what we are seeing.

When I was a child I was often on my own and entertaining myself. I had inherited my older brothers' toy trains and, in these pre-Lego days, a bag full of stick-together bricks, a green rubber roof, and little rubber window frames. I had some dolls, small and large, and access to a very handy old-fashioned coat-rack.

Trains went round and round on the tracks I put together, houses were built and demolished, and I festooned that coat-rack with string, toy cradles and scraps of material to make a complex construction I swore was a hotel for dolls. I dressed up in lovely draggy things I found in my mother's drawers; I created prison cells from sheets and the backs of chairs, where I lived on bread and water for about half an hour before defeating the Enemy. I made a fire in an old Churchman's cigarette tin and then tried to disguise with desperate crayoning the blackened patch in the cupboard.

Outside, I peered at beetles and ants and the tail of a lizard to my lucky mother. I made a cubby-house from a huge crate and I tried to glue things with melted plastic. It is not necessarily possible, I discovered, to distil the colour from a rose by boiling it in water. I climbed trees. I tried to make a bow and arrow. I read, in equal parts, Superman comics and the classics.

And so on.

How would you gender-define this play – and why, really, would you bother?