Pin the tail on the donkey is dead, having been replaced suddenly, and without ceremony, by pin the handbag on the Bratz.
The humble ass has been tossed aside in favour of a pillow-lipped, multipierced doll that makes Barbie look like a feminist icon. It's all pin the guitar on the Bratz these days. Or pin the belly ring on the Bratz. At this rate it won't be long before someone sticks a drawing of a big fat cat on the wall at a children's party. Pin the tail on the Celtic Tiger, anyone? Oh, goody.
My choice for the contemporary version of the game would be stick the needle in the eye of the Bratz (and chop off its sinister feet-cum-shoes so it is forced to hobble around the world forever on plastic stubs). But you could spend the rest of your life trying to rid the world of Bratz and still only scratch the surface of this insidious toy plague, so instead I decided to try to help create a children's party with some old-fashioned imagination-fuelling values.
All this is written in the exhausted afterglow of my fairy godchild's sixth birthday party. The lovely HB - she's sharp as a pencil and has teeth as white as vanilla ice cream - had been expecting a treasure hunt. But her mother and I felt 14 girls traipsing around the house looking for clues could prove slightly head-wrecking. After several brainstorming sessions during the breaks in I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!we decided to split them into three groups and get each group to perform a play in front of the others. We reckoned that between rehearsals and performances the whole thing would take us to teatime. Madness, you might be thinking. A recipe for disaster. You might very well have been proved right, but as it turned out it was one of the most pleasant afternoons I've spent with a posse of shrieking six-year-olds in ages.
Much thought went into deciding the stories the groups would perform. My sister chose Cinderella. My boyfriend plumped for Sleeping Beauty. And I, because it was the simplest story I could find, chose The Princess and the Pea. The idea was that we would all come up with a simple outline of the story and gather together three bags of props and costumes, one for each group. My boyfriend arrived at our preproduction meeting - five minutes snatched between balloon-blowing and chicken-nugget-making - with a typed script. His props included a silver cup emblazoned with a duct-tape cross, "for the christening scene". Obviously. Mostly, though, the scripts were scribbled on the backs of envelopes, and the prop bags overflowed with chiffon scarves, princess dresses, tiaras and Snow White slippers.
After taking our groups into separate rooms to rehearse we convened in the sittingroom for the performances. A couple of highlights: the reluctant prince (it's very difficult persuading a six-year-old girl to play a boy) twiddling his/her painted-on moustache while searching for a real princess in the audience; and the really quite scary bad fairy in Sleeping Beauty, played by HB's cousin Mella, terrorising my boyfriend while he gallantly attempted to read his marathon narration.
We had briefly considered abandoning the play idea and booking an excellent-sounding clown service called Silly Sally. It probably would have been easier, but it wouldn't have been half as satisfying.
The day passed in a blur of lipstick, princess stylings and applause, and it was time for tea before we knew what was going on. We didn't even have time for pass the parcel. This was no great loss in my opinion. Pass the parcel proper appears to have gone the way of the donkey's tail, and, now, instead of finding one prize lurking inside the parcel, there's a prize for everyone at the party. Which is deeply humanitarian, but what was wrong with having just one winner? Losing at pass the parcel never did us any harm.
The rest of the party was pretty traditional, although a guess-how-many-jelly-beans-in-the-jar game added a frisson to proceedings. You got to keep the jar of jelly beans if you guessed correctly, and much comical head-scratching ensued. With a bit of amateur face-painting added to the mix, the time flew.
Towards the end of the party, as the pin the guitar on the Bratz contest was being announced, a girl called Sophie gave her home-made chicken nuggets a poke with her fork. I love the little unexpected confidences that children sometimes divulge to adults at these parties. "I don't like Bratz," Sophie whispered to me, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit. "Neither do I. To be honest, I hate them," I whispered back. Sophie nodded as sagely as a six-year-old can. There is, it appears, still hope.