PROSPECT Hospice has remodelled its Havelock Street charity shop to deal exclusively in things for children.

Other items will still be available at its shops in Commercial Road, Regent Street, Victoria Road and elsewhere.

Check out www.prospect- hospice.net to learn what’s where.

I hope the kids’ shop is a big success but I can think of something that might be an even bigger one: another shop, also full of kids’ stuff, but none of it made after about 1990.

It’d be a magnet for people who managed to survive childhood in what are now officially the Olden Days, and wanted to relive those happy years when Father Christmas and the Birthday Fairy expected about a fifth of their clientele to end up lacerated, bruised, burned or poisoned, but didn’t care as long as profits stayed nice and perky.

On entering the shop, you’d be made to sign a legally-binding promise not sue anybody in connection with the shop or anything bought there; only then would you be allowed to touch the stock.

One of the first things to greet the customer would be a big display of toy cars – not the modern movie tie-in-type ones made of lightweight alloys and sprayed with non-toxic paint, but the old-style ones made of things like iron, mercury and arsenic, and whose paint had so much lead that it accounted for fully half of their weight.

“Now then, children,” we could say when we bought the treasures home, “lick this toy car once and you’ll end up at the back of the class. Lick it twice and you’ll end up in the class where the teacher uses a cattle prod and little Timmy with the hairy ears ate his desk last week.

“Lick it three times and there’s a bright future ahead of you as the boss of an electricity or gas company – or perhaps a train franchise.”

There would also be a selection of cuddly toys; not the current, safe kind but the old ones made with artificial fibres that went up like Roman candles if you so much as left them within a yard of the radiator, and which were stuffed with random bits of foam, straw, dead mice and the odd thumb belonging to some unfortunate Soviet Bloc factory worker.

The doll section would be along the same lines, but with more of an emphasis on potential psychological trauma than physical. There’d be those old crawling dolls that crawled like no human baby ever did, but moved instead like something demonic and implacable from one of those nightmares where your limbs are suddenly immobile, no matter how hard you try to run.

There’d be those talking dolls that always seemed to sound like the kid in The Exorcist, and there’d be at least one of those junior ventriloquists’ dolls with the orange hair, the ones you and your friends never had because you all knew the thing would be out of the cupboard, across the bedspread and biting your ear as soon as the lights were out.

There’d have to be a special section in the shop for chemistry sets. These days the best a kid can hope for in a chemistry set is changing the colour of some dyed water by adding some other dyed water; in the old days you could make ammonia, invite your unsuspecting parents to have a good old sniff of the test tube and then count the minutes before they regained the ability to breathe.

An entire shelf would also be devoted to model kits – not the modern snap-together ones but the type that needed hallucinogenic glue. Patiently assembling a plastic Heinkel or Panzer is character-building, but it’s even more character-building if you think there are giant scorpions climbing the walls.