Bored of the Rings....

So Thursday night was primary school admissions night.  Bearing in mind we had precisely one option for a school which would allow me to actually deposit both Thomas and Ben at their respective childcare/educational establishments in time to have any prospect of getting to work, and for which the admission requirements did not involve actually taking up residence on the roof in order to meet the 0.00001 metre catchment area, things have obviously been a little tense in the Chaos household and extended family.

Well, for “things have been a little tense in the Chaos household and extended family”, read “I’ve been a little tense while everyone else has apparently been breezing around with absolute confidence that everything was going to work out just fine.”

So, while everyone else was tucked up in bed, sleeping the sleep of the certain-everything-is-going-to-be-fine, I was settling in for an evening of compulsively checking the time and calculating how many minutes remained before one-second-past-midnight.

Obviously, I needed something to distract me.  So, having recently watched The Hobbit on DVD, I decided that what I really needed was a marathon viewing extravaganza of The Lord of the Rings extended edition box-set.  There’s nothing like a bit of doom-laded declaiming and unnecessarily long names to take your mind off the time.

Now I am a big Lord of the Rings fan.  I scared myself completely silly reading the first volume at age eight and giving up in the middle of the Mines of Moria.  What Lord of the Rings was doing in the infant school library of a very strict convent school, I have never quite figured out, but I was suitably traumatised and didn’t touch Tolkien again until I was thirteen, when I read the whole three at one go – in bed at night with a torch, under the desk in lessons and round the back of the squash courts while hiding from the PE teachers.

I was instantly hooked, and went on to work my way through Tolkien’s extensive “back-story” writings and even tackled the Silmarilion which is, admittedly, pretty heavy going.  And then, many years after I entirely failed to learn how to make scones in Home Economics due to my attention being somewhat distracted by speculation about whether Gandalf was, in fact, dead, I heard the news.  Someone was making the film of Lord of the Rings. 

I posted here about my huge mistrust of film adaptations of popular books.  I therefore spent a fair bit of time boring people with my extensive theories about why this book was unfilmable.  Peter Jackson clearly either never heard about my compelling theories or, inexplicably, he didn’t care, and he cracked on and made the films anyway.  I accordingly slunk into the local cinema and sat looking sulky while the title credits came up.

Two hours later I slunk back out again, feeling a little sheepish.

It was good.  Peter Jackson had done a blinding job.  This became even more apparent when I saw the full versions of all three films.  There were a couple of things that I hadn’t quite picked up on in the books, but they were in the films.  There was also some clever use of new dialogue to preserve some of the best bits of description in the films.  In short, I approved.

However, even the most hard-core Tolkien fan, would probably have to concede that the films are

fairly ripe for parody and mockery.  HWSNBN refuses to watch them on the basis that everyone has stupidly long names and that nothing is just a chair or a road – they are all the Chair of Somebody or the Road of Something Else.

To be fair, he has a point.  There is an awful lot of “Come, Men of the West.  Let us take the Road of Dimridil that leads beneath the Mountain of Doom and thence to the Mines of Moria (currently held by Balin son of Dwalin son of Stalin son of Bob, King under the Mountain, Lord of the Deep and Protector of the Stone of Scone) where we shall challenge the Hordes of Mordor and cross the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, probably encountering a Balrog of Morgoth, before making our way into the free lands of Lothlorien, kingdom of the Lady of the Morning etc etc.”

 

There is, in short, a good deal of declaiming and a fair bit of Going On at Length.

Unfortunately, I discovered on Thursday night, that declaiming and going-on is quite irritating while you are impatiently waiting for something to happen.  I found I was tapping my fingers every time one of the main characters made a speech.  I had the distinct feeling that Gandalf and Co were personally responsible for the fact that only three and a half minutes had passed since the last time I looked at the clock.  I also found that I had very little patience for the amount of sad pouting that the main characters went in for. 

Oh no!  The evil Ring of Doom hath been found.  [sad pouting from the Great and Wise of Middle Earth]

Woe is me!  I must leave my lady love who might decide to bugger off overseas in my absence.  [intensely sad pouting from Viggo Mortensen]

Aaargh!  Gandalf hath plunged to his doom while fighting a balrog.  [sad pouting all round]  [spectacular lack of insight into the fact that a bit less pouting and a bit more sticking sharp swords in balrogs might have avoided this outcome]

I suspect my lack of patience with the pouting and the declaiming comes from the fact that I’d just seen The Hobbit.  Now this film has had a bit of a bad press from some quarters – mainly due to the insertion/expansion of various things that either weren’t in the book at all, or were mentioned so fleetingly that they might as well have been omitted entirely.

One of the big criticisms has been the creation of a key role for a character who never actually appears in person in any of the books, although he is mentioned in passing, the nature-loving wizard, Rhadagast the Brown.  The main issue that some critics seem to have with this character is that he is off his head on magic mushrooms, has bird-poo running down his head from the nest under his hat, and rides around in a sled pulled by bunny rabbits. 

All good and valid concerns, you might think.  But I LOVED Rhadagast.  It was quite clear that the filmmakers were abundantly aware of the amount of pouting and declaiming that they had in their film, and introduced Rhadagast as a nice little antidote, a bit of gentle self-mockery.

So when the main party is attacked by goblins and wargs and Rhadagast offers to draw them off, Gandalf declaims in his usual doom-laden tones, “These are Gundabad wargs.  They Will Outrun Yoooou” [pout and glower], Rhadagast replies in equally declamatory tones “These are Rhosgobel rabbits.  I’d like to see them try.”

The rest of the scene involves the main characters fleeing (with associated pouting and sword-brandishing obviously] while a mad, poo-stained wizard hurtles past periodically in a sled pulled by bunnies.

Cracking stuff.

Unfortunately, it left me unable to take Lord of the Rings terribly seriously.  I couldn’t help thinking that the whole quest could have been despatched much more efficiently, and with considerably less pouting, if they’d just brought some magic bunnies with them.

So Lord of the Rings proved a bit of a flop as a distraction technique. 

But time did eventually pass, and at one minute to midnight I started hitting the refresh button with the kind of speed that would probably have won me the 2013 World Speed Texting Championship. 

It was like the final stages of an epic, Middle-Earth style quest.

And so it was written, in the time before the memory of men, that a day should come when the Admission Process of Doom should be ended, and when the Young of This World should be cast into the School Allocation System.

And the People of the World did wail and declaim.

And the Local Education Authority did not hear their cries, for it was engaged in forging a single, all-powerful Application Form.  And so the power of the Form did cast a long shadow over the land, and all did fall under its thrall.

One Form to rule them all

One Form to find them

One Form to bring them all

And in a catchment area bind them

He got his place.  Life will continue as normal without the need for hugely complicated, pan-county child-drop-offs.  We can forget about school applications for a while.

Until Ben’s turn comes, of course.

And in the darkness, something stirred.  Its time would come…..

In my day....

I am very much not down with the kids right now.

Well, I might be down with the kids, but I’m definitely not down with what the kids are watching on TV these days.

In my day [assumes pose intended to indicate that ‘my day’ was back in the heyday of the British Empire] children’s television was sensible and comprehensible, with well-rounded characters – and I don’t just mean the Flumps- and meaningful plots.

Like half-human, half-feline cat-creatures who fled their planet and went into cryogenic sleep for about twenty years, during which time only the main character aged, for vital plot purposes, while everyone else mysteriously stayed the same, befo re arriving on a planet ruled by a really angry mummy. 

We could all understand that – I mean, we’d all come across really angry mummies from time to time.

Then there was Jamie, whose magic torch opened up a portal under his bed to another world which was accessed via helter-skelter.  I’m guessing Jamie’s Magic Torch came to an abrupt end after Nightmare on Elm Street made sure that the underside of a child’s bed was never going to be a friendly, sunshiny place ever again.

 

 

And Mr Benn who never actually had to walk anywhere.  He’d just strike a pose and, as if by magic, a slightly creepy shopkeeper appeared, all the main character’s clothes fell off and were replaced by a costume apposite to whatever strange fantasy he was entertaining that day.

I think Thomas may have seen some vintage Mr Benn.  He seems to be under the impression that standing stock-still, on one leg, halfway up the stairs is the appropriate response to “Will you please get dressed RIGHT NOW.”

 

Anyway, my point is that children’s TV made sense in those days.  I have to concede that I had a fairly narrow viewing experience because children’s ITV was banned in our house.  I grew up with this faint sense that ITV was a bit dirty and nasty – if I’d heard of porn back then, I would have been convinced that naked ladies would appear if you pushed that forbidden third button on the television.  It has taken me about three decades to realise that the reason I wasn’t allowed to watch children’s ITV is because it had adverts for shiny, plastic things that cost money. 

As opposed to shiny plastic things that writhe around in the nuddy making strange noises, obviously.

Children’s television these days is rubbish.

Nothing makes sense.

Take In the Night Garden for example.  Leaving aside the fact that the whole thing is one giant innuendo about Uppsy-Daisy blowing on Iggle-Piggle’s trumpet – shame on you, Derek Jacobi – can someone please explain to me what is going on with the scale.  Are Iggle-Piggle and Uppsy-Daisy human sized (as seems to be the case when they are embarking on jolly japes, like chasing Uppsy-Daisy’s errant bed around the woodlands) or are they actually smaller than the Ninky-Nonk?  And what about the Harhoos, or Hargoos or whatever you call them?  Why does no-one ever see them next to anyone else?  Are they giant inflatable shapes or little teeny-tiny inflatable shapes?  And what is going on with the Pontipines and the Wattingers?  They clearly have some sort of long-running neighbor dispute that the Pontipines are in denial about.  Stop inviting the Wattingers to picnics and things – they HATE you.  And you’re all really, really small and keep getting lost under flowerpots and logs and things.

Or you might be really, really big and living in a strange giant world.  Who knows.

And then there’s Mike the Knight.  The whole premise of which seems to be that you should learn from your mistakes.  Which makes it rather odd that they’ve chosen for their main character someone who never, ever learns from their mistakes.  Ever. 

“It’s time to be a knight and do it right.”

Good plan.  Excellent idea.  Except that you said that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.  AND YOU’RE STILL SCREWING UP SPECTACULARLY!

Even Ben sometimes looks puzzled while watching Mike playing with matches on top of a haystack, or turning his parents into frogs, or whatever, quite incomprehensibly, seemed like a good idea to him that day.

But I think I’ve figured it out.  Children’s television is clearly part of a government plot to brainwash the voters of tomorrow into accepting unpopular policies.

Look at Bob the Builder, for example.  Bob and his motley collection of talking road-diggers have clearly been enrolled on the Workfare scheme, or some variant thereof, and are quite obviously working on unpaid projects for the benefit of the community.  Seriously.  No local authority in this economic climate is going to be spending money on some of the frivolous projects that Bob seems to be spear-heading.

And then there’s Postman Pat whose local rural post office is quite clearly about to be shut down as part of a Royal Mail cost-cutting exercise.  And to be fair, if the owners have enough time to wander about the village during opening hours, helping to track down a missing sheep or an errant parrot, they can’t really argue that they are running a profitable franchise.  Even if they try to market themselves as a Special Delivery Service, their days are numbered.

 

Grandpa’s Amazing Shrinking Cap is an extremely transparent metaphor for the dwindling pension pot, and the producers are clearly trying to portray the elderly as unruly, frivolous and slightly bonkers, in order to ensure that no-one has any sympathy for them, while that family who live in the windmill with an unfeasible number of children (including an extremely sinister magic baby) are

obviously intended to attract criticism of large families and garner support for proposals to cap child benefit at two children.  Although it's always entertaining when the lady who sometimes pops up to do the signing for CBeebies appears on Baby Jake, makes a token attempt at signing "Goggy gee-ah" before giving up with a shrug and a weak smile. 

Then there’s that scary doctor with his fixed, manic grin who is clearly designed to put children off medical professionals for life, thus preserving the limited health budget.  I’m not quite sure what Mr Bloom’s Nursery is all about, but I want to be there for the episode where the “Meet the veggies” song has to be changed to “Eat the veggies” and Mr Bloom has to explain that those cute little anthropomorphic characters are now inhabiting the rather nice root-vegetable pie that all his little volunteers had for lunch before filming began.

But it’s all fine.  We now have an alternative to the brainwashing of CBeebies.  The StrawberryLine Miniature Railway has followed up the phenomenal success of its “DVD of really small trains driving round a really small railway, punctuated by people talking about really small trains” with a sequel.  Given that Thomas’s current list of heroes includes Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman and Mike, the owner of aforementioned Strawberry Line Railway, that is his viewing sorted for about the next six months. 

I suppose it’s better than Tractor Ted, the other current Thomas-and-his-cousins obsession.  You’d think there would be limited entertainment that could be extracted from watching people drive tractors through narrow gates and tip grain into a barn.  You’d think that, but you would be very, very wrong.  When Tractor Ted is doing his thing, a nuclear bomb could go off in the back garden and there wouldn’t be even the slightest flicker from the intensely concentrating faces on the sofa.  Which is great if you need to get things done, but not so good from the point of view of having really, really annoying songs stuck in your head.  When Tractor Ted entered our lives, I discovered that there is actually more than one song about combine harvesters in existence.

 

And trust me, it is nowhere near as good as the Wurzels’ take on the subject.

The Sound of Silence

I seem to spend an awful lot of time in search of silence.

My definition of silence has, however, changed somewhat in recent years.  It used to be the thing you only got deep in the countryside, when the wind wasn’t blowing from the direction of the nearest main road, and only when the local owl population weren’t having the avian equivalent of a parish meeting in the nearby woods, and when there wasn’t a squirrel in the eaves, doing its best impression of a fairly determined poltergeist.

These days, my quest for silence is not a search for the total absence of noise – it’s just a search for noise that isn’t actually directed at me.

Does she honestly think we're
going to play quietly in there?
 

Take soft play for example.  Put about a hundred small children in an enclosed space with sugar and as much brightly-coloured plastic as the world is capable of producing without completely wiping out its oil reserves in one fell swoop, and the ensuing noise is probably audible from outer-space. 

Soft play is, however, my current favourite writing venue.  The thing about the noise created by Other People’s Children is that it is surprisingly easy to tune out.  The noise created by your own children, however, is a sort of auditory heat-seeking missile.  Thomas, for example, can be about a hundred yards away, at the bottom of a pile of children, entirely submerged in a metre-deep ball-pit, and yet his cry of “Mummeeeeeeeeee.  Have you got caaaaaaake?” arrives in my ears with as much force as if he was standing right next to me with a loudhailer pressed against the side of my head.

I know babies are programmed to have a particularly penetrating cry, in order to reduce the risk of their parents going hairy-mammoth-hunting and forgetting to come back and retrieve their offspring from whichever bush they’d hidden them under.  But surely this evolutionary skill should have reduced by the time they reach pre-school age?  Is there really a biological need for their parents to be able to identify that they “neeeeeeeeed a weeeeeeeee” at a hundred paces?

Soft-play occasionally provides sufficient distraction for me to have five minutes when none of the wails of “Muuuuummmmeeeeeee” in my vicinity are directed at me.

Keep going, my son -
I can still hear you...

Occasionally. 

If the stars align and the wind is blowing in the right direction, and the plastic car that Thomas likes is free, and Ben’s attention is caught by just the right combination of coloured plastic balls.

Oh yes, Ben is well and truly in on the noise-creating act.  For someone who can’t actually talk, he has an awful lot to say.

 

Like “Mumumumumumu”.  Not, as you might imagine, a loving tribute to his beloved mother. 

It actually means “MoremoremoreNOWmoremoreBEFOREIDIEOFHUNGERmoremore.”  And in case you don’t get the point, he illustrates it with a pair of little grabby hands opening and closing like two particularly impatient clams.

And then there’s “Dadadada”.  It might mean “Daddy.”  Possibly.  Once in a while.  But it is far more likely to mean “ThatthatthatthatINMYFACERIGHTNOWthatthatthat.”

And did I mention the moan?  Ben has pretty strong views about the world around him.  Specifically, the requirement that it should revolve around him at all times.  If the world fails to live up to his fairly high expectations in some way – if, for example, there is food in the vicinity that isn’t instantly in his face, or if his doggy has disappeared from his sight for a micro-second, or if he has hit his brother over the head with a bicycle pump and is experiencing that sinking feeling that you get when you know you’ve really done it this time – he expresses his disapproval loudly and persistently until the problem is rectified.

So I’ve given up my search for silence.  I’m just going in search of a better quality of noise these days.  In the absence of enough peace to actually do some writing, I’ve started going to listen to people talking about writing.  Bath currently seems to be the literary centre of the universe, with all sorts of eminent author-type personages being sucked into its gravitational field.  The recent literary festival saw appearances by serial prize-winner Hilary Mantel, and the stratospherically successful J K Rowling.  J K Rowling’s talk was something of an eye-opener – there were actually people screaming.  Grown adults screaming like pre-teens at a Justin Bieber concert.  Ms Rowling looked faintly startled. 

Although I can’t exactly talk.  One of the local independent bookshops seems to have the kind of literary contact list that could be mistaken, at first glance, for the Times Literary Supplement’s Top One Hundred Authors of All Time.  They recently produced Kate Atkinson.

I ran about screaming.

In my front room, you understand, not at the Kate Atkinson talk.  I have some self-control.

The announcement of Neil Gaiman’s appearance in June produced more arm-waving and screaming.

And when Margaret Atwood was confirmed as coming to Bath in August I achieved levels of high-pitched squealiness that were probably only audible to the local dog population.

And possibly bats.

Thomas and Ben looked at me disapprovingly.  I was, as Thomas informed me, stopping him hearing the television.

Sorry.

[whispers]  Margaret Atwood.  Squeeeeeeeal!

Peace on earth...or something like that.

On Boxing Day I lost a Christmas-themed quiz.  I was not happy.  Not at all happy.  I do not like losing at quizzes.  This is a well-known fact.

I was particularly unhappy that the question that sealed my team’s defeat was about what is probably the best-known Christmas song of all time – The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Apparently, the twelve lords did not leap. 

Well, they leapt.  There just weren’t twelve of them. 

Allegedly.

I am pretty sure the last time I checked the leaping was being done by twelve lords.  While eleven ladies danced.  Presumably with one lord thinking “what the bloody hell am I doing this for – I’m not going to get a lady, no matter how much I leap about.”

Unless there was wife-swapping going on.  Maybe on the thirteenth day of Christmas the true love turned up with thirteen sets of car keys in a bowl and a hopeful smile.

Anyway.  I could have sworn there were twelve lords.  I was so certain, I even invoked the Great God Google which came up with a Wikipedia page.

HA!  There are several variations of this song.  One, for example, begins with ‘Twelve lords a-leaping…’

Triumphantly, I read this out to the room, continuing through the list – eleven ladies, ten drummers, nine pipers….

Until one of my own team helpfully pointed out that we still had it wrong.

Bloody drummers.

However, it got me thinking about this song and it occurred to me that the singer was doing pretty much what I’ve been doing today – a spot of Christmas stock-taking.  No doubt he/she was beached on the sofa, trying to watch Lord of the Rings Part 2 over the top of his/her mincepie-filled stomach and attempting to muster up the energy to go and rummage in the toybox to find the source of the disembodied voice that periodically intoned “To infinity and beyond” before drop-kicking it out of the front door with a cry of “Off you go then.”

Or something like that.

Anyway, this was Christmas in the Chaos household.

 

On the first day of Christmas a photography company gave to me…

…a photo of a random child on a CD.  Instead of the photo of my three-year old that I had actually paid for.  And a whole load of muppetry when I rang to politely point out their error.  How in the name of arse am I supposed to provide the proof number of the missing image?  Presumably the clue is in the word “missing.”

 

On the second day of Christmas Ben gave to me…

…two mobile children.  The little bugger just had to learn to walk the week before Christmas, didn’t he?  And the smuggety-smug look on his face really isn’t necessary.

 

 

 

On the third day of Christmas my colleagues gave to me…

…a three am arrival home from a night out resulting in my first and last hangover of 2012, a pair of lost shoes and a resolution to never drink again.

 

 

 

On the fourth day of Christmas Jessops gave to me…

…four photos printed in an entirely random and unhelpful size – seriously, what is it with purveyors of photos this Christmas?

On the fifth day of Christmas Baskervilles Gym gave to me…

…five million trillion overexcited and rampaging children all waiting for Santa’s half-hourly appearances to turn somersaults in the middle of the play-gym.  Don’t ask.  I’m trying to wipe the experience from my memory.

On the sixth day of Christmas some people who clearly didn’t like me gave to Thomas and Ben…

…unfortunately considerably more than six noise-making devices.  There is the drumming wooden dog, the unbearably smug Buzz Lightyear, the excruciatingly cheerful Chuggington train, the five speckled frogs book, and all the other things that can be bashed, blown, thrown, buzzed and wound.  And that’s without even mentioning the fact that our living room now looks as though Toy Story came and threw up in it.  Every piece of Buzz Lightyear merchandise ever made now lives in our house.  Along with Mr Potato Head.  And every single Toy Story jigsaw puzzle that has ever existed.  And possibly some that have yet to exist.  There can’t be this much Toy Story stuff in existence – it has to be appearing via some wormhole from a future where Buzz Lightyear rules the universe.

On the seventh day of Christmas my extended family gave to me…

…a seven-point defeat in the annual Christmas quiz.  Yes, I am still sulking.

On the eighth day of Christmas my sense of duty gave to me…

…eight minor injuries sustained while attempting to assemble a flat-packed toy kitchen with instructions in Polish.  But payback came with about two hours of vegetating on the sofa while two small children played kitchens with a slightly alarming level of frenzy.

And that’s it.  We’re done.  I don’t care what happens on the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth day of Christmas.

Well, unless it involves lords a-leaping.  A dozen of them.

Then I’ll be asking for a re-count.  We was robbed.

It's raining, it's pouring....

It rained yesterday.

 

It rained a lot.

 

Can someone explain to me why rain, which is after all just water falling from the sky and getting things wet, makes everything a million times more difficult than it needs to be?

 

Take loading children in the car, for example.  This isn’t exactly the easiest process at the best of times.  It generally starts about ten minutes before the time I need to be actually reversing off the drive, with some gentle suggestions about the putting-on of shoes and the putting-down of lego.  It then escalates, with some low-level chuntering and moaning, and generally finishes up with one small child being carried to the car, tucked under my arm, kicking and yelling that his shoes are on the wrong feet, or that he wants a caaaaaaaaaakeeeey, while child number two utters high-pitched shrieks from his car-seat and hurls purple, squeaky giraffes and multi-coloured caterpillars, before wailing that he can’t possibly be expected to survive for two seconds without the exact same toy that he just chucked into the nearest puddle.

 

But yesterday, we had rain to add to the equation.  The kind of torrential downpour that you normally only get in cartoons – where opening the front door appears to be a trigger for a thousand tonnes of water to be dumped in about two square meters of space in three seconds flat.  This meant that as well as a kicking, screaming small child, I also had to carry a brolly.

 

 This did not go well.

 

I did think I had it sussed when I managed to balance the umbrella on the top of my head while strapping Thomas into his car seat. 

 

Unfortunately the rain had other ideas and promptly changed direction ever so slightly in order to slip in underneath the brolly and soak me from the knees down.  And while this was going on, Thomas thought it would be helpful to hold a conversation about the making-mummy-wet properties of rain.

 

My mummy?

            What?  What?

Are you getting wet?

            Yes, I bl…jolly well am, Thomas.

Nooooo, you’re not.  Silly mummy.

 

Oh yes.  Silly me.  Silly, soggy, cold, dripping me.  With one more child still to load in the car.

 

And then there was the reverse process at pre-school.  I came up with the great idea that I would give Thomas a piggy-back, in order to avoid the usual snails-paced dawdle that characterises our usual progress through the school grounds in the morning.  So I put up the brolly, squatted down beside the car door and invited Thomas to climb on my back.  Or at least I thought that’s what I said.  Thomas, however, clearly heard “Please stand up on the edge of the seat and then take a flying jump at me, knocking me flat on my face in the pouring rain.”

 

There is nothing more fun than lying face-down on a soaking wet pavement, brandishing a slightly superfluous brolly, with a small child on your back, while another pre-school mum walks past with a faint smirk.

 

Actually, yes there is. 

 

Many things, in fact.

 

But it’s not just the small child factor.  Everything is more difficult.  You need extra layers, and spare shoes and a bag that doesn’t let the water in and then keep it there, sloshing about merrily.  Your papers disintegrate and you stick your hand in your pocket and find soggy little nubs of tissue that then attach themselves to your nice black suit and refuse to be brushed off.  Your iphone no longer works because Apple technology was designed for entirely dry countries, so you can see that someone is calling you but you can’t actually answer the phone, no matter how many times you swipe damply and ineffectually at the screen.

 

And then there is the traffic.  Heavy rain appears to send the entire population into the kind of frenzy usually reserved for encroaching biblical floods.  As far as I could tell, every resident of the never-more-appropriately-named-Bath had taken to their cars for no purpose other than to drive around frantically in the rain.  They probably all had car-boots crammed full of pairs of any domestic animals that they happened to have handy.  Two lop-eared rabbits, two Russian dwarf hamsters and a pair of elderly, incontinent daschunds. 

 

Go forth, my people, and re-populate this brave, new, post-deluvian world with small, fluffy rodents.

 

It took about twenty minutes to cover a mile.  Mainly because everyone had to drive reaaaaally slowly through an admittedly large puddle that was all of 2cm deep.  And quite clearly 2cm deep because in order for it to be any deeper there would have to have been a fairly substantial crater in the road.  And that is the kind of thing you tend to notice when it’s not raining.

 

And don’t even get me started on the crawling traffic caused by the burst water main that was not actually on the road, in any danger of leaking onto the road and not, in fact, causing any problems relating to the road in any way, shape or form.  But everyone had to slow down to 5mph.  presumably because the mere presence of a burst water main meant that WE’REALLGOINGTODIEOFLOTSOFWATERLOOKLOOKTHERE’SEVENABURSTWATERMAINTHATPROVESITHELPPANIC!

 

If it rains again tomorrow I am going to join in the general sense of impending apocalypse.  I will remain home with all the windows locked and sandbags in front of the door.

 

Despite the fact we live on a hill.

 

If everyone else is going to panic and flap their arms then I don’t see why I should be left out.

 

OMG!  RAAAAAAAIN!

 

Just trying to get in the spirit of things.

 

[runs about waving arms and wailing]

The Great British Play-Off

Now I am aware that I may, just possibly, have engaged in a teeny bit of ranting about soft-play centres before. 

In my defence, there is a good deal about which to rant.

In a previous post, I proposed a set of rules which would make everyone’s lives a lot less fraught, and lead to considerably less gritting of teeth and muttering of “No, no, that’s fine”, delivered in a voice that is clearly actually intended to convey “In a minute I will hit you over the head with a baby walker and bury your body in the ball-pool”.

Clearly these rules have failed to catch on.

I have therefore had a re-think, following another delightful, relaxing session at our local play-gym, and I have a solution.

I think the problem is that people don’t like rules.  Not the hard-and-fast, byelaw-type rules.  We are talking about a British play-gym here, populated mainly by British people.  And British people are famous for things like their fondness for queueing and their adherence to things like sportsmanship and fair-play.

Or something like that.

I am therefore proposing a slightly more flexible system.  Less byelaw, more Queensbury rules.  If everyone applies some basic principles of fairness and common sense, the world of soft-play would be a happier, less teeth-gritty place.  I have accordingly set out a few suggestions below:

1)       If your child hasn’t figure out queuing yet, he probably isn’t going to miraculously figure it out in the middle of Sunday morning play-gym.  He is almost certainly not going to leap out of the ball-pool with a cry of “Eureka!  I have invented a new and exciting concept involving standing in a line and waiting my turn.”  It might, just perhaps, be a good idea for you to involve yourself in his queuing endeavours, rather than standing ten feet away, shrugging and grinning sheepishly as he pushes other children out of the way, yelling “Nooooooo! Myyyyyy turn!”

2)      If you decide that queuing really isn’t something you feel your offspring should be subjected to, you probably need to embrace the idea that other parents might feel differently.  Standing nearby, pouting and huffing really isn’t going to convince the parents of patiently waiting toddlers to lift your child, rather than their own, up onto the rings.  And trust me, when another parent says “oh I think you’d better wait for your daddy”, what they actually mean is “Oy! You over there! We can all see you dithering wetly behind the slide and we’re not taking over your parental duties for you so you can slink off and read the paper in the corner.”

3)      And if you do choose to allow your child to launch himself at the jumping-off point for the rope swing in an effort to get in front of the queue, you probably need to bear in mind that the child who is mid-swing will not be able to alter the laws of physics in order to accommodate the unexpected presence of another child in their already-established swing-trajectory.  They will collide with your precious offspring.  He will cry.  This is entirely your fault.  Not your child’s fault.  Not the other child’s fault.  Not the fault of the parent of the other child, or the parent of the child at the front of the queue.  It does not matter how many baleful glances you shoot at everyone around you – this will not change the fact that it is your fault. And let’s be honest.  You know that perfectly well.  You are just choosing to ignore the unpalatable truth because it makes you feel better.

4)      Other undesirable attempts at self-justifying blame-shifting include, but are not limited to:

Glaring and tutting when your child runs headlong into an entirely stationary adult and falls over.

Huffing and muttering when your entirely unsupervised baby crawls onto a trampoline that is already occupied by a happily bouncing toddler, and begins to wail to be rescued from this strange, unstable place.

Shooting the nearest, although entirely blameless adult, a venomous glare when your wobbly, just-walking child falls over in their general vicinity.

None of these things are convincing anyone but you.  All that they are doing is ensuring that everyone else marks you up as Parent Who Must Be Avoided, and that no-one will lift your child onto the rings or slide lest they should be subjected to legal action if it all ends in tears.

5)      The ball pool that has been set-up as the landing-point of a ring-swing at the end of a mini assault-course is probably not the best place to hold an NCT group post-natal meetup.  Two week-old babies probably don’t need to be in a ball-pool.  They certainly don’t need to be en masse in a ball-pool which is entered from above at 30 second intervals by airborne pre-schoolers.

6)      If you really can’t think of anywhere your two week-olds should be, and choose to set up camp in said ball-pool, causing ring-swingers to perform elaborate contortions to avoid kicking you in the back of the head, it is Not Good Form to flinch and duck pointedly when the other fifty small play-gym users dare to attempt even a restricted, cautious swing.  And it is Really Not On to physically shove them away mid-swing.  This is likely to cause their parents to shed the already-stretched-to-the-limit veneer of civilised behaviour and belabour you about the head with foam blocks and small ride-on toys.

7)      If your older child is following a crawling baby around the gym, taking away everything he tries to play with, the tight-lipped smile that the baby’s mother is bestowing on you is not intended to convey benign tolerance so much as “Get.  Your.  Child.  Off.  My.  Baby.”

I am optimistic about the implementation of this new system.  After all, everyone really  wants to get along. 

Don’t they?