Museum of Childhood

Have you ever visited the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood? It's on the Royal Mile, and free to wander round. It's also quite interactive - there are lots of things for kids to do including dressing up, lego and guessing what's the thing in the box. Multi-sensory-tastic.

Having said that, the core achievement of the place is actually to highlight the fact that childhood in the olden days was utterly terrifying. And now I shall show you for why, through the medium of photographic records.

Here you can observe that as a rich young person of yore, one of the must have toys was apparently a mad-eyed dog with real hair that will gradually fall out in chunks as the years go by. So what if it looks a bit like it might be able to exercise some kind of mind control? The constant headaches and horrible nightmares are worth it so long as you're cool.

Meanwhile as a poor child you'd be more likely to get an old shoe kitted out in a dress made from old hankies. You can't see it too well here but this thing has one of the saddest little faces you ever saw (which appears to be made from masking tape, although I'm fairly sure that cannot be the case. Will go back some time to check...)

If you were an EU child from outwith the UK back in the day, you might own a doll who has clearly seen something terrifying.

It could even have been this Mexican ghost doll.

Or the sinister decapitated pixie head pencil top thingy. See how it loftily sizes you up as it decides what will be the slowest and most painful way for you to be despatched.

And then for kids at the shows, there was Alf the satanic carousel horse. Would you allow a small child to ride on this thing? Maybe if you wanted rid of it for some reason I suppose. But small childs rarely leave behind a large inheritance, or even a will, so why would you want to do that? Ya weirdo.

I do think though, that one too many rides on Alf might unlock some pretty serious voodoo, after which you might end up looking a bit like this:

Food for thought, innit.