Graeme Cousins: My family absolutely love Lego but do we really need an Eiffel Tower that is taller than my son?

We owe a lot to Godtfred Kirk Christiansen who filed the patent for Lego (a contraction of the Danish phrase ‘leg godt’ translated as ‘play well’) on January 28, 1958.

I can’t remember what we were doing on Saturday, but there’s a good chance we were building Lego, thus we subliminally celebrated the 75th anniversary.

My wife and I are working on the Home Alone house while Ben is chipping away at the Mighty Bowser. Lucy meanwhile is pulling all the hands off our minifigures, a habit she’s maintained since a young age.

It sounds like we’re living this lavish lifestyle, buying Lego left, right and centre, but the truth is we never go out and even when we’re in the house I won’t turn the heat on unless the temperature falls below zero – so we’ve not much else to spend our earnings on. And anyway, building Lego is a great way to stimulate circulation and stave off the cold.

Such is the universal appeal of Lego that my mum has recently got in on the act, building such things as The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, several collections of flowers and a Vespa scooter.

Perversely, my favourite bit about building Lego sets is when you spot a mistake you’ve made or when you finish a bag but end up with extra pieces that you know have to fit in somewhere, requiring you to work backwards and discover the error of your ways. I also enjoy fixing other people’s mistakes though it’s never as appreciated as it should be.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that the world of Lego has become very structured if you’ll excuse the pun.

You build a set and it stays built, which is the premise of the first Lego Movie so even the company know it.

It’s a far cry from the days when you built something, wrecked it, then combined the bricks with 13 other sets to build something monstrously amazing. At the end of a session everything was dismantled and put into a huge plastic bag. Only my dad knows where that bag went. I can even remember the colour of the bag. It was a grey bag. A grey bag I fear I’ll never see again.

That’s not to say my kids don’t enjoy tipping all the spare Lego pieces onto the living room carpet and swimming in them from time to time.

That’s why it’s great to see TV shows like Lego Masters, where the art of free building is rewarded as adults compete to be their country’s number one Lego builder. If you haven't seen it, it’s a bit like The Great British Bake Off, but with a pantry filled with bricks instead of eggs, flour and icing.

Another trend, like most things, is for Lego to get more and more expensive. Currently there’s a set of the Eiffel Tower which is just a centimetre shy of being one and a half metres tall (good luck displaying that subtly) and costs a whopping £554.99.

Sure you could travel to Paris and climb the real thing for less than that.