London - This has been a momentous week for Sir Ian Botham. Not on account of anything that has unfolded in the world of cricket, but because, rooting around in his mother’s attic, he rediscovered Mr Khrushchev, the teddy bear that, in Fifties Somerset, was his beloved childhood companion.
Botham promptly tweeted a photograph of himself proudly holding a faintly bewildered-looking and - if the legendary cricketer and famously pugnacious alpha male will forgive me - rather moth-eaten Mr Khrushchev.
Actually, he might not forgive me. One criticises a man’s boyhood teddy at one’s peril.
About 20 years ago, I was reunited - rather like Botham after a poke around my mom’s attic - with my own much-loved Panda.
He was smaller than I remembered and a little grubby, but it was an emotional reunion, for I had been an only child and Panda was for years my most reliable friend and confidant, the only one certain not to drop me and become best friends with John Hepworth at number 43.
It was a fairly volatile relationship. Until I was about six, Panda shared my bed. Then, as I got older, he became my punchbag.
After watching any John Wayne western featuring a saloon brawl (which, of course, was every John Wayne western), I would retire to my little bedroom and punch poor Panda’s lights out.
Then, as I got older still - and I would be embarrassed to confess to this if it weren’t for the fact there are no holds barred between a chap and his teddy - I used Panda to practise proper kissing.
Hence my delight at finding him again. I took him home and showed him to my wife Jane, expressing the hope that Panda might find a role in the life of our first-born child, with whom she was six months pregnant. Jane gave me a queasy, non-committal smile. There was clearly no place in her heart for this elderly cuddly toy, and, in fairness, no reason why there should have been.
When I forced a discussion of this uniquely emotive issue, she admitted she saw no justification why Panda should take preference in our child’s affections over her own Teddy Edward, still languishing - along with her sister’s Teddy Robinson - in her parents’ attic.
Things became heated. I suggested, cruelly, that Teddy Edward was a notably unimaginative name for a teddy. She countered crossly that Panda wasn’t much of a name for a panda.
When the confrontation had died down, Jane put Panda in the washing machine, on a “delicates” cycle. She still claims there was no murderous intent - she just wanted him, if he was going to play any part in our baby’s life, to be as clean as possible.
But the outcome of the lukewarm wash was about as tragic as it could have been.
Panda disintegrated. After surviving all those thunderous right-hooks, not to mention all that exploratory kissing, he met his end in a juddering Zanussi.
All that remained was an ear, which I kept in a drawer as a small furry rebuke to my wife.
Hardly anything tested our relationship in the early years of our marriage like the death of Panda. “I think it was the spin that did for him, not the wash,” she said. “All that centrifugal force. So try to think of him, right at the end, having loads of fun whizzing round and round.”
It was no consolation. I was distraught. Sir Ian Botham, I like to think, would understand.
You can see in the photograph he tweeted that he is trying to keep his emotions under wraps, that really he wants to take Mr Khrushchev by the paw and go for a walk in the woods, perhaps even make a den together.
Who’d ever have thought of ‘Beefy’ Botham, one of the great he-men of British sport, as a latter-day Sebastian Flyte, the effete aristocrat in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, who was inseparable from his bear Aloysius? Nobody would.
And he’s not, really. When Botham allowed his public to see the photograph of him and Mr Khrushchev he knew that it wouldn’t diminish his manly image. If anything, it reinforces it, because just as we like a real man to be in touch with his feminine side these days, so, too, we like him, now and then, to show his inner child.
Nothing brings out the inner child like a favourite old bear. There is a lifelong bond, even if it is interrupted by decades of (the bear) festering in the attic.
After all, long-familiar smells and tastes evoke our childhoods - for me it is the smell of linseed oil and the taste of Dairylea on cream crackers - but these are fleeting, transient experiences. A venerable cuddly toy, or any other childhood toy, kindles proper memories.
It offers a useful connection, amid the tribulations of adulthood, with a time when a cuddle was all the comfort we needed. When the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman died in 1984, it is said he had his boyhood bear, Archie, and his stuffed elephant, Jumbo (to which he was equally devoted) in his arms.
Archie was properly famous, too. His full name was Archibald Ormsby-Gore, and Betjeman had introduced him to all his undergraduate friends at Oxford.
They included Evelyn Waugh, who modelled Sebastian Flyte and Aloysius on John Betjeman and Archie. As famous teddy bears go, of course, not even Archie can compete with Winnie the Pooh, named by AA Milne after his son Christoper Robin’s teddy.
Christopher Robin Milne’s original Pooh bear was made by the London toy manufacturer JK Farnell, and as anyone who watches Antiques Roadshow will be aware, Farnell bears are almost as sought-after now as those made by the German company Steiff.
It is Antiques Roadshow, Cash In The Attic and TV programmes like them that have propelled thousands of us into lofts and cellars in the faint hope that dear, tatty old Teddy might be worth as much as the family car.
But I dare say some of those who have found the trademark Steiff button in the ear of a cobwebby bear have faced a dilemma. After sharing so many childhood adventures, does he really deserve to be packed off to auction?
Again, Beefy Botham would understand. In his 2007 autobiography, he wrote about a hernia operation he underwent in Yeovil General Hospital, at the age of four.
He said his parents “brought in my teddy bear, Mr Khruschev, a name inspired by the influence of television in my early upbringing, when the bear-like Soviet leader regularly featured on TV news bulletins”.
“The nurses pretended that Mr Khrushchev had had the same operation as me, and even bandaged him up to sustain the illusion.”
Those words radiated proper affection, and that was before Mr Khrushchev resurfaced in his life. So, although I never thought I’d write it of Botham, bless him.
And bless Mr Khrushchev, such a good name for a teddy bear. So much better, if I may say so, than Teddy Edward.- Daily Mail