Moment of madness: For Big Ted, a welcome break

It is difficult, when contemplating the prospectus of an enterprise such as Toy Traveling, to know quite how to react. One is caught between rejoicing that the western world’s economic woes must be over if a service such as this expects to turn a profit, and fear that the poor and downtrodden of the world may glimpse its website, rise, enraged, against the planet’s more privileged citizens and start stringing us from lampposts.

Prague-based Toy Traveling is a travel agency for toys. The idea is that for a fee ranging from €90 to €150 ($122 to $203), depending on the package, the agency will take your teddy bear – or stuffed cow, or plush elephant, or whatever – on a tour of the Czech capital, photographing it next to the city’s many beautiful landmarks. It will even drop you a daily e-mail updating you on your plaything’s progress and/or create a Twitter feed chronicling same.

In fact it is depressingly easy, given the advancing infantilisation of western adults, to imagine this being a soaraway success. However, it is some small consolation that no amount of money will compensate Toy Traveling’s owners for having to deal with the sort of people likely to be their customers.