I never got over losing my cuddly toy (From Preston and Leyland Citizen)

I never got over losing my cuddly toy

12:14pm Monday 20th April 2009

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A friend of mine moved house recently and somewhere along the line, lost a lion.

Not a real one – although by all accounts you used to be able to buy them in Harrods – but a toy one, which she had owned since childhood.

“If anyone finds it they’ll think it’s just a bit of rag and throw it away,” she wailed, “It is so battered and worn, no one but me would recognise it as a lion.”

It is fairly common to spot descriptions of beloved toys in the ‘lost’ sections of newspapers. There’s usually an ‘inconsolable’ child linked to the adverts.

But adults can be just as sentimental about toys, particularly those they have loved and cuddled since childhood. And when one is lost, after so many years, it can be very upsetting.

I didn’t go a bundle on soft toys when I was young – I didn’t go to sleep in a sea of fluffy bunnies and kittens like some girls (my eldest daughter is one of them and if I give one a goodnight kiss, she insists I make it fair by kissing all of them – a good half-hour’s job), I didn’t take exams surrounded by lucky gonks and I didn’t drag a teddy around with me like that bloke in Brideshead Revisited.

But I did have three very special toys – a knitted doll called Minnie, a rabbit, also knitted, called Bobtail and a plastic crocodile found on Whitby beach, called, imaginatively, Croc.

I remember the feeling of utter horror when I came home from college one day to find Bobtail gone. My mum told me she had given him to my sister who had asked for him to draw at art college. My sister claims not to know anything about this, and to this day Bobtail remains missing.

I still feel furious and hurt when I think about it, and have many times been tempted to put Bobtail’s details on the website Toys Reunited.

That site reassured me that I am normal, that I’m not a crackpot who shouldn’t get so worked up over a woollen toy when so many worse things can happen. I was heartened to see photographs of shabby-looking pandas, frayed elephants and objects resembling dusters that were once teddies.

And some of the heartfelt messages were from people well over the age of consent. I no longer have Croc – he fell apart, but thankfully, I still have, and treasure, Minnie. And I haven’t given up hope of finding Bobtail. For anyone who thinks they may have seen him, he is about as eight inches high, with standing-up ears, a green jumper and red trousers.

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