DID Shakespeare have a Musical Teddy Bear Play Mat? Did Einstein have a Playalong Interactive Barney? Did Jane Austen have a Princess Barbie Horse and Carriage?

Probably not. If they had, it seems, we might not have heard of them.

Too many toys stunt a child's imagination, according to new research by educational psychologists. Ironic really, just when the Government launches a scheme to put toy libraries in deprived areas. But although some children are left bored and not at all stimulated with nothing to play with except the remote control, many of today's affluent children have so many things to play with that they end up playing with none of them properly.

And you thought you were doing your best...

The trouble is that so many of the toys do all the playing for them. If your cuddly toy speaks to your three-year-old, sings to him and teaches him how to count, it doesn't need much input from him. Like too much television, it encourages them to be passive, to switch off, to be one of life's cabbages, instead of a doer or a thinker.

Children need to use their imagination. For generations most children's play meant practising to be a grown up - so little boys played with swords and horses and hammers and little girls swept and cleaned and cared for their dolls. And most, left to their own devices, still do.

(Though it's some time since I've been to a playgroup. Maybe little girls now play at being investment bankers and kiss their dolls goodbye at the Wendy House each morning.)

We all know that children always reject the present in favour of the box it came in, because the box has so many more possibilities. It's not limited by its design. Tricky trying to turn a pink Barbie house into a space station or castle. But a cardboard box can be anything at all.

My children rejected their beautifully designed playmat, with its permanent design of roads and railway lines, in favour of a patch of soil by the back door. There, every day, they could create their own new town, ever changing, ever adaptable, much more interesting and fun. Much dirtier too, but there you go.

In an experiment some years ago, some Danish (I think) children were deprived of nearly all their toys. And what happened? For a day or so the children fretted helplessly, not knowing what to do with themselves. But pretty soon, they used the limited materials they had - a box, a bit of stick, cotton reels, that sort of thing - and created a whole new world for themselves. A world much richer, more vivid and far-ranging than they'd had with their carefully designed bits of multi coloured plastic.

So maybe we should stop buying them toys altogether. No more frantic queues for the latest must-have toy each Christmas. No horrendous bills. No more packed toy cupboards.

Just pop along to the supermarket and pick up a few cardboard boxes instead. It could be the best present that you have every given them.

SCIENTISTS at Glasgow University have been researching the best way to crack an egg.Yes really. Anyway, the so called experts decided in the end that the best way was to use a palette knife.

Funny that - because every top flight chef consulted by various papers in the last few days, all reckon that's load of nonsense. The best way, they say, is to crack it on the side of the bowl - one-handed if you're showing off. So who's expert opinion would you rather trust?

The researchers had to crack hundreds of eggs in the course of their earth- shattering work. Bet they didn't half get sick of omelettes.

ASH Wednesday today, start of Lent. Are you giving up anything?

Most people who do these days, and there are precious few who do, tend to look upon it as a way to jump-start the stalled New Year diet and give up biscuits or chocolates or booze. Not so much to the glory of God, but more in order to fit into the cossie at holiday time.

Maybe we need the idea of Lent more than ever these days. Apart from reasons of our own health and vanity, there is little real need for most of us to give up anything at all, but maybe we should give up something we enjoy, if only for the sake of exercising a rare self-discipline.

Smaller Son when about seven-years-old, gave up fizzy drinks and wouldn't drink Coke, not even at his birthday party, which fell on Maundy Thursday.

Inspired by this example and having already virtually given up booze and chocolates, I thought of giving up my nightly treat of listening to the Archers.

But all the characters are so irritating at the moment, that would probably be more a pleasure than a penance.