Lego is a better investment than gold, said the Telegraph recently. What they meant, specifically, was that if you ploughed your savings into Lego sets at the turn of the millennium, then left them untouched for 15 years, you’d get a bigger increase on your money than if you’d done the same for pretty much anything else. Those are the stats – according to the Telegraph – but the reason this is a news story for our time stems from the fact it neatly combines two of the most pernicious aspects of the modern world: 1) Mind-bending asset price inflation, and 2) The sickening infantilisation that has been stealthily pervading day-to-day life for the past decade. It’s only a matter of time before we’re all swapping handfuls of Lego bricks in exchange for a tiny bowl of imported kids’ cereal and a go on the life-sized reconstruction of Thomas The Tank Engine that is the centrepiece of a horrific new Shoreditch nightspot. That or another massive, cataclysmic recession. I’m honestly not sure which sounds less appealing.
You have to feel a bit sorry for the G string on a guitar. It’s the Jack Mehoff or Wayne King of the string world, forever destined to be snickered at when someone says its name, because people have got their filthy, smutty, sinful minds in the gutter. This review will therefore be conducted without, at any point, envisaging the hilarious and searing agony of a piece of cheesewire bisecting you from the unmentionables up. As a key, G is fairly faultless. A fair chunk of the best songs ever written are in G, from You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away by the Beatles to Cowboy Dreams by Jimmy Nail. As a string, though – that is, just the note G, the fourth string down, out on its own like a lost and baffled beagle – it’s a bit....whiny. It’s always the first to go out of tune, always the first to snap, and can’t decide whether it wants to hang around with the spry, unwound falsetto tearaways (those cads B and top E) or the earthy, thick old guard (the unshaven and mucky-fingernailed A, D and bass E).
What we have therefore is a crisis of confidence; a lack of identity. And there’s nothing less cool than not knowing who you are. Unless you’re Harold Bishop. I may be biased because one time a G string snapped and hit me in the eye, but this is just how I feel. Oh, and anyone now amusing themselves with a mental image of a pair of tiny pants snapping and hitting me in the eye can go directly to hell. They always say that you should judge something on its what it is, not on what it does. Judge the art, not the person making it – you’ve heard that one, right? Bound by that moral code, I can’t very well critique a Tunnock’s Tea Cake on the basis that it has apparently attempted to sever ties with its Scottish roots. No, I can only critique it for what it is, which is a bulbous mound of sickly mallow encased in factory-dregs chocolate and sawn off with a biscuit base. That bloody biscuit base – corkboard that sands your tongue, merging with the saccharine filling so you’re one step closer to a £1,560 dental bill by the end of teacaketime.
Its only reedeming features are the comforting way that “Tunnock’s” rolls off the tongue, the sort of word you say when you sit back in your rocking chair and pat your paunch, and that they are possibly the only sweet treat that you can buy in a box for a £1. Then again, you could also buy a double chocolate muffin. So just do that. Because I am part of the DI-why bother generation, more likely to chuck something into landfill than, you know, actually repair it, I’ve never had much use for Polyfilla. Indeed, my landlord would probably fine me into next year if I ever attempted to haphazardly fill the walls of their precious house with the strange squelchy substance. In other words, I’m fantastically ill-suited for this review. But hey, let’s plug on because of #content. There’s no disputing that Polyfilla (known, rather wonderfully, as Spackling paste in the US) is a remarkable invention, magical even. Consider the evidence: it’s a soft, moist putty that, almost without notice, becomes harder than Charles Bronson.
For years, this strange alchemical matter has been the saviour of builders, plasterers and have-a-go-hero dads everywhere. Yet, I can’t be alone in being a bit terrified of Polyfilla, a substance that in the wrong hands could be extremely dangerous. I mean, what if I accidentally mistake a tube of it for toothpaste? Or what if a serial killer fills my throat with the stuff, suffocating me to actual death? (Something similar happened with a can of expanding foam in No Offence – THE THREAT IS REAL) What if, what if, what if? It’s just too risky. I simply can’t have the stuff in my house. So instead, I’m just going to stick with getting the repairman in, and watching him shake his head at my utter millennial fecklessness. Do you want milk or sugar, mate?If you make your living by betting people what the largest (by number of bricks) Lego structure is, then I’m sure you know that the record goes to a colossal X-Wing fighter, made from 5,335,200 bricks. Well, did go to. It’s time to revise your data, because Land Rover has beaten that X-Wing with a Lego Tower Bridge that’s the new World’s Largest.
The Tower Bridge is made from 5,805,846 Lego bricks – enough for everyone in Norway to step on with a bare foot and start swearing, in Norwegian. The 40-foot-high sculpture was commissioned by Land Rover as way to show off the new Land Rover Discovery and finally prove that they can build a car capable of driving over millions of tiny toys. There’s real water under the bridge, and that water was put to good use: The finale saw sailing Olympic gold medallist Sir Ben Ainslie drive the new SUV through 900mm-deep water under the bridge, while towing a LEGO replica of the Land Rover BAR boat, a 186,500-brick model of the boat that will challenge for next year’s America’s Cup.Land Rover’s press release had this to say of their triumph:The reveal set was made from 5,805,846 individual LEGO bricks; breaking the previous Guinness World Record by 470,646 pieces. Laid end to end, the bricks would stretch for almost 200 miles, or from Tower Bridge in London to Paris.Led by the UK’s only LEGO Certified Professional, Duncan Titmarsh, it took five months for expert LEGO Master Builders in the UK to construct the incredible Tower Bridge structure.