If this prevents anyone from making a very big mistake it is worth it......

It was about this time (October 2010) when we asked our then 6 year old daughter for ideas for Christmas. It is often difficult because she has 2 Christmas's each year one with me and my wife Sue (and step-sister) and the other with her mum and some of her half-brothers and half-sister (complicated) so quite often I am a little worried about duplication.

In this case I think her mum quite wisely ignored her constant requests.

In fact when we first learnt about Toffee the Pony it was something of a surprise as we thought she would have wanted a DS or something more adventurous, but no she had seen adverts on the tv and this was the one and only toy.... the object of her desire!

When she told us Sue (my wife) waited until she had gone to bed and searched online and quickly uttered some rather rude word under her breath when she saw that Argos were in fact selling this toy for £100! In fact that was exactly what it stayed at until only a few weeks before Christmas when the price had dropped by half and Sue texted me to say she'd reserved one at one of our local Argos stores. We thought we'd one the lottery, and we were to learn later - well Christmas Day to be precise what a total waste of money it was.

That year the four of us had been invited to Sue's sons for Christmas and we crammed the car full of presents for her son, her parents and for my daughter who we saw enroute, so we limited the children's presents to one sack each that somehow we managed to sneak into the boot while they were engaged elsewhere and this toy took about a third of her sack.

Christmas Day arrived and we waited with baited breath as she pulled open the wrapping paper surrounding this relatively large box. Her first reaction was TOFFEE, TOFFEE.... I've got TOFFEE! A minute or two later Toffee had been removed from the box, batteries inserted and the plastic carrot and brush removed from the cardboard they had been tied to.

Well, it looked ok made with soft velvety material and the most characteristic feature of Toffee was its bulging eyes with long eyelashes. A few cuddles and the odd brushing of its mane was almost as much as my daughter actually did with the toy as everytime she picked it up it turned off (fell asleep) which pretty well made this the most expensive waste of money we have ever bought. Sometimes you have to rely on instinct and mine (and Sue's) was that this would provide her with very short-term interest. In fact, Toffee is still in my daughter's bedroom..... gathering dust!

So what does it do.... well apart from the odd "Neighhhh" and the odd winking / blinking of its eyes.... absolutely nothing! For £50+ my daughter could have had a lot of better toys - we learn from our mistakes!

So, in my honest opinion this is one toy to avoid at all costs.