Current Affairs Karaoke

My excellent friend Jenny Laville has had a rather marvellous idea.  Spend Fridays knocking together alternative lyrics to tunes based on current celebrities or news stories and offer them up to you all to attempt to sing along.  She explains it much more elegantly than that here .

Anyway, I thought I'd give it a bash so here's the Kaiser Chiefs Versus Julian Assange

I PREDICT A RIOT by Kaiser Chiefs A sineas karaoke project (get your own lyrics)

“Watching the UK get lairy
Against detention arbitrary,
Staying in town is quite scary
It’s not very sensible either
The costs of the stay kept increasing
It’s taken a lot of policing
Would never have happened with Snowdon
An old wikileakean

Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker

Wanted by swedes as a rapist
He says that the claim’s without basis
He’s probably been a bit naughty
but won’t tell his side of the story
He won’t face the music in Sweden
So Assange was stuck here in London
With death threats from the Americans
That’s not very sensible

Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker

Is there anybody left in here that doesn’t want him left out there
Watching the UK get lairy
Against detention arbitrary
Staying in town is quite scary
And not very sensible

Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker

Is there anybody left in here that doesn’t want him left out there
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
Extradite a hacker
”

I found it much easier to do when I could hear the original lyrics in the background - but I'm not very musical.

Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot from their album Employment.

Dante's Tenth Circle

I cannot stand soft play. A padded cell for adults and children.  They are palaces of chaos, confusion and genuine horror. I've seen it go full on Lord of the Flies on a bouncy castle; a group of children surrounded the weakest one, bouncing in unison, chanting 'Piggy, Piggy, Piggy!" as the little one begs for mercy. There's always one child limping towards the cafe with a hand over one eye, whilst another rocks back and forth sobbing at the top of the death slide like extras in Saving Private Ryan.

Soft play centres are petri-dishes for every cough cold and stomach bug in a ten mile radius.  The tacky feel of the reinforced plastic that covers every surface; it's the miasma of snot and spit that makes it shiny and sticky, you just know it is. You can see the gastroenteritis glistening on the walls. There's always a slight smell of vomit in one corner, you can't see anything but you know it's there, lurking, awaiting its next victim. You won't believe what I've pulled out of a ball pool. Toddler shit.  That's what I've pulled out of a ball pool.

It's the wall of noise I really hate.  You walk through the door and it engulfs you, driving out all rational thought.  You have to rely on primal reflexes as a massive eight year old rages towards you like one of those fast zombies Danny Boyle invented - luckily if you do have to roundhouse kick one in self-defence at least you know they're likely to have a soft landing. 

There are a lot of dads at soft play, but they're usually solitary creatures, nestling in the glow of a laptop. There is always a pack of evil mums. They sit in the badly designed cafe bit, rolling their eyes as they have to move their massive Storksacs to let a raddled mother of 4 get to the suspect looking squeezee bottles of ketchup.  They sigh like Hurricane Sandy as the kid at the table next to them opens a second packet of crisps and they're not even Pombears. Apparently 'Tarquin and Jemima are absolute treasures and doing so well now they've started at the Steiner school.' but I'm pretty certain I just saw Jemima hit a toddler square in the face with one of those wrecking ball things.* I think it's the disparity between their behaviour and the standard to which they hold other people that pisses me off. 

Finally there's the undignified scramble to get the kids out of the bloody place.  It is hard to maintain a sense of authority when you are trapped between the horizontal rollers, like Winnie the Pooh after too much honey. There are tears, tantrums and stamped feet before the kids finally realise mummy is at breaking point and they need to stop laughing at her from the suspended rope bridge and come down and put their bloody shoes on. 

Still, anythings better than dealing with the kids at home.  See you there next weekend.

* If you haven't gone full Miley Cyrus on one of those things, you haven't lived. Its worth holding the 4 year old's birthday there just so you can get away with it and they can't kick you out. 

Never Go Back

Last week we went swimming and there was a simply gorgeous 6(ish) month old in the pool. Seeing how besotted my son and daughter were with her and how utterly wide-eyed-adorable this little one was as she experienced the world and all its wonders - and when you're 6 months even a public swimming pool is wondrous -  I did get a little twitch in the uterus, a fleeting 'maybe we're not done yet...' wistfully crept through my mind. After that I had to physically escort my 6 year old out of the pool as he refused to leave, tried to hide under the water and almost drowned himself. I then turned an elegant blue whilst wrestling the still wet and wriggling three year old back into the party dress she'd insisted on wearing to the pool and that thought went into hiding, but it kept popping back up for the rest of the week. 

Today I was browsing through my photos and I found this one and it all came rushing back. The wearying horror of going out for a meal with a one year old. I remember hauling toy after toy after toy out of a change bag the size of our local Tesco, before resorting to car keys and finally settling on a phone to keep him occupied for the interminable 10 minute wait between ordering and the food arriving.  I remember trying to hush his shrieking demands for food, whilst he was already eating. (I'd totally forgotten what it's like to have a hungry baby - and how said baby, unaware of the food in his mouth, became incandescent with fury that the fork was empty.) I remember juggling plates, glasses and cutlery with practised skill, as our bundle of joy attempted to ram each and every one of these artefacts as far into his eye socket as it would go. I can once again feel the rictus grins on my face as my pride and joy attempted to back flip out of the high chair and brained himself on the wall behind - can't react, it will only set him off, just pretend everything is lovely and fine and la la la. I recall shovelling in mouthfuls of cold food with congealed gravy hanging from the fork, utterly unaware of what it tasted like, in the focussed drive to keep my ball of self-destructive energy calm and quiet, so as to not piss off the other people in the restaurant. I am unclear now as to why we did this to ourselves.  

I would like to balance these memories with tales of what it's like to eat in a restaurant with an profoundly unhungry child, one who is more interested in everything from the light fittings to the floor tiles than the food on her plate. I can't. We did it once in August 2013 and it was so stressful we didn't eat anywhere that didn't have a soft play attached until she was three.I am now zen enough to consider half a cherry tomato and the inside of a bread roll a nice meal out. I didn't order her her own plate of food until November 2015. 

These memories have jack-boot stomped any thought of another one into dust.  Once you're out never go back.  Never go back. 

Things I Found in my Handbag

It's time for me to clear out my handbag, so I thought I would share a list of the detritus that has accumulated in the hopes that this act of self-shaming will ensure I don't leave it so long next time. The horror.  The horror.

2 notebooks
One for ideas, one for writing full sets.  Writing shit down has always helped me remember it.  I didn't know when I was revising for my A levels that the useful bit would be learning how to revise. 

Make up kit
For those sleep-deprived mornings when I need to draw a better face on my face to minimise the risk of scaring small children

Tampons
Obvs

A smurf
I don't know why this is in here or where it came from.  Neither of my children like smurfs.  It has reminded me of the first bit of slash fic I read on the internet:  Smurf orgy.  You can google it, but I advise you don't - unless you want to see what websites looked like in 1995... and read porn about smurfs. 

A lasso
For small children to rope things, and for the roping of small children in extreme circumstances.

3 pebbles
A day is not complete if I have not been gifted a small pebble.  

Organic matter of unspecified origin
It's in one of those small resealable bags so... cucumber?... grapes? Farewell emergency snack food, we hardly knew ye.

One cereal bar
For times of extreme need

One chocolate bar wrapper
Natch

My purse
This is where things get a bit like Russian dolls.  I really should clean this out too but that would make this post a bit too Inception for my liking. 
Top tip: photocopy the precious things; the card from your kid, a note from your dead mother.  Trust me.  It will save hours of uncontrollable sobbing should you lose the damn thing.*

A phone
I think this now does about 40% of the jobs my brain used to do.  Recently it ran out of battery when I was driving and I learnt I can't read a map anymore. I wonder what else I've unlearned. The same top tip applies; back up all your phone stuff to the cloud or whatever back up service is available to people who aren't locked into the cult of apple. Data storage is pretty cheap and could stop your heart from breaking. 

My car keys
Occasionally. Those sneaky fuckers could be anywhere.  One time they were under the baby. HOW DID THEY GET UNDER A BABY?

Broken head phones
Because there's nothing to make a commute more enjoyable than untangling headphones only to discover that they don't work.  I make sure I put them back in the bag so I can repeat this special moment multiple times. 

Leaflets
It's a testament to hope over experience that I pick up so many of these glossy shiny leaflets for fun days out that we will never go on. There are 3 membership forms for different gyms. See, I can fail myself as well as my children whilst simultaneously destroying a rainforest. #winning

A child's sock
Since 2009 every bag I own has contained at least one child's sock

* I am happy to report that a lovely lady from Walthamstow returned the purse that contained my dead mum's note.  I think of her often and with enormous gratitude. 

One For All

In the past 6 years I have watched a hell of a lot of children's television and I would like to start by reiterating, thank Christ for the BBC. High quality children's television is in pretty short supply and the BBC provides most of it, though an honourable mention must go to the consistently brilliant Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom, which is basically Das Kapital for toddlers. There is one feature of many children's programmes that is a real bug bear of mine. It's all those programmes with an anthropomorphic gang of things - they might be dogs, dinosaurs, pirates or monster trucks (ffs) but the personalities remain pretty pretty consistent; there's a leader, a clumsy one, a nerdy one, a funny one and a girl one. Like being female is a personality type. 

It's just so frustratingly limiting. They are constantly reinforcing the message that boys have agency and action and options. Girls are supportive sidekicks.  I am very happy to be corrected on this but I can't think of an episode of an ensemble tv show where the girl one gets angry, insults a team mate and has to learn a valuable life lesson about working as part of a team.  She always works as part of the team.  I have watched boys and girls playing together - this is patently not reflecting the real life of 3 year olds. There is little more monstrous than a thwarted three year old ego - gender does't come into it. Floor-rolling, fist-clenching fury is accessible to all. But on TV the girl one smiles and helps and does what she's told by the boys... or she sits tight and waits to be rescued, if the clumsy one is having a week off. 

Nick Jr is apparently trying to appeal more to girls.  The screen now looks like a unicorn has vomited over 50% of the schedule.  There's Shimmer and Shine, the pink and purple genies, Little Charmers, pink, purple and ice-blue witches and Dora and Friends: Into the City, which has an ensemble of girls and one boy. I don't think this is helping. 

It's easy to argue that it was ever thus... but it wasn't.  That's not true.  There were quite a few female characters in He-Man but the spin-off series about his sister, She-Ra gave us so much more. She got her own series, a kick-ass movie to launch it and her own toy line, which I wanted more than pixie boots, hair crimpers and a hologram alter-ego combined.* Dungeons and Dragons had a range of boys and girls with different personalities and abilities wading through an existential nightmare.  The Get-Along-Gang were equal in their anodyne moralising. It was a boy and a girl who worked together in The Mysterious Cities of Gold. You might argue that I'm cherry picking the programmes I'm mentioning, but these are the ones I remember watching. These ones mattered to me. It's also safe to say that kid's TV wasn't quite so targeted in terms of age groups back in the eighties either. I watched Press Gang - with it's flawed but fabulous boys & girls and plot lines including suicide and sexual abuse - with my friend's 6 year old brother. So, not all targeting is a bad thing. 

The segregation of boys things and girls things is whittling away at the range of options available to both. I think by specifically marketing products to girls we are fortifying the pigeonholes. Those girls' science kits that encourage you to make lip balm, bath bombs or whatever seem reductive rather than expansive. Lego Friends focusses on imaginative play (and a reductive set of roles at that) rather than designing and building, because that's what girls like, apparently. My daughter is perfectly happy making The Emperor, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have a lovely tea party on the Lego Death Star thank you very much, she doesn't need pastel colours to make this ok. Also, my son would love to do pretend play with a lego ice cream parlour but he doesn't even see it exists because he no longer registers what's in the pink boxes in the toy shop.  I tried to get him to look once and he laughed in my face. He knows it's not for him - those are the rules and I have taught him that it is good to follow the rules. A girl's rainbow is now three colours; pink, purple and, thanks to Frozen, ice blue. My son is expected to inhabit a grimy world of brown and khaki green with the occasional splash of JCB yellow. It's hardly a full spectrum for either of them. 

But I am a coward.  I will tweet the @lettoysbetoys account with images of my kids engaging in barrier-smashing play, barbie riding a dinosaur etc., but I have never once rocked up to a birthday party with a toy that isn't gender appropriate.  I strive for gender neutral but sometimes the pink thing with sequins is the easiest thing to wrap, so when the party is t minus 20 minutes and I'm going to have to wrap this shit in the car that's what I get. I'm going for the rather weak line of positive affirmation - I will now only buy toys from toy shops where the Star Wars display has Rey front & centre. Where she should be. 

* The majesty of Jem requires a post all of its own.  Sometimes undiluted girl power is a good thing.

Header image from calker.com

Arts Emergency

My last blogpost was a heartfelt rant and I stand by it.  However, I am aware that by sending my kids to all these classes and offering them these opportunities I am helping them build connections and jump the queue so that they can enter artistic worlds that are not accessible to huge swathes of the population. A poor kid with a passion to create art simply doesn't have the same chance to succeed as a rich kid with pushy parents like me. Therefore I feel I need to highlight the existence of Arts Emergency. It's a brilliant new(ish) charity that aims to "Give people who don’t come from privilege the chance to study what they love!" 

Have a wander around their website and bung them a quid or two if you feel so inclined.

Ballet, Beavers and Bullshit Hassle

Last night I stood in a freezing corridor alongside seven other mums and one dad, wedged between a bag of gently reeking ballet shoes and a formica table that shaved slivers of skin from my hands.  I am paying just under £150 a year for this. We parents exchange knowing glances and war-stories of what we did when the Nursery Teddy came to visit, like the battle hardened veterans that we are. Some of the mums have babies strapped to them like dynamite on an innocent hostage in an action film. I feel their pain. I would rather chew my own ears off than return to the days of lugging a tired baby around like an angry bumbag, whilst my eldest child refused to participate in whatever activity I'd decided would make him a more rounded and superior being that week.  The lesson with the second one is, only sign them up if they're willing to beg for it. OK, so my toddler is in the other room doing her first, longed-for ballet lesson and is effervescent with joy, it is shining out of her like sunshine on a frozen lake but this is about me dammit. I am hating every second of this.  

When the lesson is finished I pour the three year old into her onesie (how the hell did anyone get anything done with kids before the advent of the onesie?) and whizz home. Then comes the obligatory threatening of said three year old whose head is still too full of sugar-plum fairies and happy/sad feet to eat her fucking pasta.  We compromise on 3 pieces of pasta and 2 biscuits. Sigh. Then it's out the door again to relieve the ever so lovely, but by this time slightly frazzled, after-school-club teachers of the six year old.  There is not enough money in the world to induce me to spend my afternoons with 40-50 kids in a hut for 2 1/2 hours after their full day at school. Ladies, I salute you. 

I then pay another £150 a year to entertain the by now exhausted and recalcitrant toddler whilst the older one does Beavers (fnar fnar - that name is never not funny, even in these circumstances).  My options for said entertainment are yet another freezing hallway, a freezing field or a pub that looks on children relatively tolerantly during the day, but it's dark outside for god's sake; real actual human people may want to have a drink there by this time and I don't want to be that parent - at least not if I'm sober. We go back to the car and listen to the Frozen soundtrack for the billionth time. 

And so it goes; ballet, drama, swimming, martial arts, music, singing, brownies, coding club, magic circle, fire-eating, taxidermy, paragliding, jousting, cage-fighting- whatever the latest bullshit hassle we put ourselves through to give our kids every opportunity to become exceptional rounded human beings. I decide to put my foot down. No more. They don't need it. Enough.

There was no #wineoclockblues last night. Wine was indeed had last night; to fend of the pressure headache, to prevent me screeching at my husband and to drown the total what-the-fuckeriness of it all. I lay on the sofa, and thought 'Am I fucking insane? Am I really paying the better part of £600 a year for this experience, to stand in corridors and fight with toddlers and unravel slowly as the week goes on?' 

The next morning, eyes still heavy with sleep the three year old wanders in & starts the day with 'Mum, I love ballet almost as much as I love you.'  The six year old pops his head round the door and says 'I love Beavers, mum.' I snigger and know we'll be going back and it will be worth it.