I was browsing in a local shop last week when something grabbed my attention. To whit, a 3ft tall Lego tower crane.

When did these happen? When I was a kid, we got little Lego stuff. I remember what was, at the time, a large mobile crane. It was about 8in long and came with the usual smiling yellow chap as a driver, sensibly attired with a hard hat. I had a fair number of the diggers too, all built to the same scale. This might be where I get my love of anything large and noisy from.

Fast forward about fifteen to twenty years and I came across a pile of low loaders in my local Aldi. In a whimsical mood I decided that £12 wasn’t too bad and bought one. After assembly I was astonished how far these things had moved on. These aren’t toys any more. It’s a pretty decent freelance model of a truck that just happens to be made of Lego.

I know the fashionable thing is to decry the specialist bits now included, usually with a growl of "When I were a lad we had to make our own (insert part here)". But looking at the current crop I really can’t see how you could do as good a job without the oddball bricks.

Yes, I bought the crane. It’s sitting on my desk looking huge. It also looks surprisingly realistic considering the driver has a bright yellow plastic head. The cantilevered design is pretty much spot on, remove any part of it and it’ll sag. Whoever designed it clearly understood how these things work from an engineering viewpoint. It’d be wasted on the average eight year old.

Which leads me to wonder, are they after a different market? The Star Wars and Indiana Jones ranges suggest so. They’re labelled as being suitable for kids who probably weren’t born when the films came out. Is the real target market twentysomethings who grew up with Lego and now have a bit more spending power than they did in their pre-teen years?  The move to ever more detailed and increasingly fragile models suggests so.

At least this is a harmless form of refusing to grow up, as opposed to the toddleresque behaviour exhibited by those who can’t hold their beer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to order a large green tipper before they sell out…