One of the longest surviving toys ever created is the crayon, and Crayola just about seem to own this market. Every single year they create over 2 billion crayons. Apparently every child, on average, will work his or her way through about 780 of these crayons by the time they are ten, and every child between the ages of two and eight spends about 28 minutes every single day colouring using these crayons. I'm not sure how the people who work out these statistics manage to arrive at these figures. How exactly the statistic can be 'about' 28 minutes I'm not sure. Surely that's 'about' half an hour - wouldn't that make more sense? Or perhaps having such a specific figure makes it sound more believable. In any case, it does mean that we get through a huge amount of crayons.



Let's imagine for a minute that we deprived every single child in the world of their crayons, and stole every single crayon that Crayola produced for an entire year. That puts us in possession of two billion crayons by the end of the year. Now, let's imagine that we lay these crayons end to end. Of course, we'd have to be quite sneaky or the children who would still be sobbing from their sorrow at having been deprived of these artistic instruments would pick them up and walk off with them. But, we're in fantasy land, so bear with me. We'll lay every crayon one after another in a long line. How far do you think our line would reach? Across America? Half way round the world? In fact, our line would manage to wrap itself right the way round planet Earth not once, or even twice, but a complete four and a half times!

Putting it another way, every decade Crayola produce enough crayons to reach right from here to the moon, and since they started manufacturing Crayons they could have done a complete round trip to the moon five times.

So what is our fascination with these crayons? They crack, snap, crumble and leave horrible marks on expensive furniture. Yet somehow, holding a stick of colour in your hand you become the owner of a world not yet formed. The blank canvas in front of you hides a universe not yet born, but still drifting around in your mind as thoughts. Like a god, you create a world out of nothingness, vibrant colours flaming their way across a sea of white. Castles, dragons, flowers and cute little houses with four windows and a door in the middle, complete with blazing sun and smoke coming from the chimney. Quite why you'd have the fire on during what is clearly a hot summer's day I don't know, but this is our reality, a world where we write the rules. A world where we command existence with nothing more than a small stick of colour held together with glue.

We don't need to steal all those crayons. Every child has the power to reach the moon. And they only need one crayon to get there.