It's MASSIVE. And full of bouncy, hyperactive employees who blow bubbles on you and throw boomerangs around your head and jump out from behind shelves and try and scare you with lion puppets. Which is enormously exciting and entertaining if you're a small child; slightly unnerving if you are an adult (those puppets are more realistic than you might think.) It's all harmless fun though, and it's nice to see that the Health and Safety scaremongers haven't stepped in with cries of "careful, someone will lose an eye!" or "what if little Sally is allergic to bubbles?" or similar. Yet.
What *has* caused more than a bit of a fuss at Hamleys recently is the company's decision to bring live animals into the store. There were some reindeer on display earlier in the week - actual , live, reindeer - and they would have been joined by some penguins making a one-off special appearance next Monday.
To cut a long story short, a wildlife photographer heard about the reindeer and was outraged; he contacted an experienced social media campaigner who used a combination of twitter and facebook to encourage thousands of people to put pressure on the Hamleys management. As a result the penguin event has been cancelled, and the reindeer have been removed.
I'm not sure how I feel about this, to be honest. Something - and I can't quite put my finger on what it is - makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. It's not about the penguins (or the reindeer); I entirely agree that Hamleys is hardly the best environment for them. It's more about the speed and force with which everything happened.
There's a difference between challenging a company's behaviour and gathering together a gang of people to make them do something about it. I don't want to use the term "bullying", but....... The whole chain of events is a good illustration of the power of social media. Here that power was used for good, but (and it feels incredibly naff to be quoting Spiderman at this point) the phrase with great power comes great responsibility keeps running through my head. There's a fine line between awareness raising and rabble-rousing.
I can't emhasise enough, I'm not suggesting that the latter is what happened here. Although there was some fairly emotive language being used in tweets and blog posts during the campaign, the more I read, particularly posts like this one, the more confident I feel that the people heading up the campaign were, in fact, acting extremely responsibly; their actions seem for the most part to be well-considered and very reasonable. But there's a tiny part of me which can't help think but what if they hadn't been? That's the bit which worries me a little, I suppose.
Anyway. I bet you'd quite like to see some penguins now. Here is a whole parcel of them courtesty of the Edinburgh Zoo penguin-cam:
You can go here to see them in realtime. Don't expect to get much work done for the rest of the day if you click that link.
These aren't just any old penguins, by the way. One of them, an Emperor penguin called Nils Olav, has been knighted. Yes, KNIGHTED. From, er, Wikipedia:
Nils was visited by the Norwegian King's Guard on the 15 August 2008 and awarded a knighthood. The honour was approved by the king of Norway, King Harald V. During the ceremony a crowd of several hundred people joined the 130 guardsmen at the zoo to hear a citation from King Harald the Fifth of Norway read out, which described Nils as a penguin "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood"
He's the one who looks like this:
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