#12: The Soft Toy

To anyone else, it is a slightly grotty, rather bemused looking, anatomically inaccurate lamb. To me, he is Lamby, my childhood friend.

As you read this, I hope fond memories of Mr Fluffles or Blanky are pulling you back to a nostalgia-tinted childhood, to the time you treated your teddy to a mud bath, or left your lamb under a cinema seat.

Lamby is an object linked to memories just like Katie’s leather chair. It is an object whose emotional value far outweighs any practical or monetary value.

But Lamby is not just an object made special by associations. Lamby is an object I valued before it held any more significance than any other soft toy.

For no apparent reason, I singled Lamby out.

I mean, no offence Lamby, but there is objectively nothing special about you.

Maybe I liked the soft texture of the romper suit, the bobbly head, the shiny (now chipped) eyes, and the little smile. Maybe it was just the right size for small Ellie to hold. Maybe it reminded me of the people I loved.

Reading this article, I learnt more about children’s attachment to objects, that

‘they believe they possess a unique essence or life force’.

Perhaps this is why I feel disloyal calling Lamby an object. He is more than just stuffing and fluffiness. From a young age we express a belief in the intangibility of objects, the very concept this blog explores.

I try to remember more about the stuffed lamb. I know I used to sleep with it every night, tucking it under my arm because I was oddly scared someone was going to tickle me in the night. I know I used to take it on holiday until I became old enough to be scared of leaving it behind. I know I used to worry that I was upsetting my other toys with my favouritism of Lamby, and sometimes spent ages saying goodnight to them individually to try to make it up to them.

If this shows anything, it’s that I was an anxious child!

And that’s also probably why I was so attached to a familiar safe object. An object that made me feel less alone. An object to protect me from the giant snake in Harry Potter. (Although, strangely I was not scared in the slightest and that was how Lamby ended up on the floor and left behind in the cinema. I cried.)

Another interesting thing about Lamby is that he has never really had a gender. You may have noticed from the erratic pronouns in this article that I have used ‘he’ or ‘she’ interchangeably over the years.

Perhaps Lamby, in a roundabout way, expresses the fact that gender is a social construct unimportant to a child.

Mostly, though, Lamby shows how a physical object can bring emotional comfort. That with little rational reasoning, objects can be far more important to us than their physical value suggests.