I hate children, all children from
new borns to those on the cusp of adulthood; I don’t discriminate and happily
include strangers, acquaintances and family members. I know, not a popular
opinion. I should add that I don’t actively wish them harm, but the fact
remains that children irritate me and as such I am looking to impose a UN
sanctioned no juveniles zone. The actual mechanics of the zone have yet to be
thrashed out but I’m doing pretty well so far in policing my own informal arrangement.
I’m just hoping Ban Ki-moon will sanction some clips round the ear to
complement my glaring.
I’ve never been interested in my own
or anyone else’s progeny; as a young adult I never foresaw my family lineage
doing anything other than halting with me. I didn’t ever imagine myself as
someone’s dad, nurturing, teaching, helping a child grow into a functioning
adult and then sitting back with pride at the not inconsiderable achievements
of my loins and mind. No thank you. I know that it seems the most natural thing
in the world to many but nature and I are at odds on this one. I’m not quite
sure where this antipathy originated and there was a time when I assumed that
maybe I just wasn’t ready and nature would give me a nudge when appropriate to
take care of business.
I’m now at an age where the general
expectation is that you should be having or already have had children, if not
there must be some physiological problem precluding breeding in which case you
merit great sympathy. Most of my friends now have children and insist on
telling me all about them, sometimes sending me pictures of them and frequently
posting photos on Facebook accompanied by hackneyed ‘sleeping’, ‘crawling’,
‘first steps’ statements. I assume that I’m being afforded great sympathy by
them for my failure to procreate, the tacit ‘trouble’ I must be having; if they
knew of my dislike and disinterest in children they surely wouldn’t insist on
keeping me abreast of the minutiae of their spawn’s ‘progress’ and would come
to rightly regard me as the selfish and shallow individual I am; qualities
which I am perfectly comfortable with.
The sound of children elicits the
same response in me as nails scraped down a blackboard. I bristle in the
presence of them in much the same way that other people become tense and
uncomfortable at the presence of a smoker or a hooded teen; preferable company
in my opinion. I scan the area and plot exit stratagies like one of Andy
McNabb’s fictitious heroes. I know that they can’t hurt me, not physically, but
they can ruin my day.
I recently visited a bar with my
father, an establishment we had enjoyed on many occasions previously. By pure
good luck we obviously hadn’t had the misfortune of visiting on a Friday
afternoon before. This particular bar is opposite a prep school where the
aspiring middle classes part with their hard inherited cash in order that their
offspring receive the best of starts. A laudable idea. A little after three
thirty the formerly peaceful idyll was transformed by the arrival of squadrons
of Ritalin starved apes ‘overseen’ by a small team of moneyed, negligent,
clothes horses. It was dreadful, I hated it, my father hated it and the staff
clearly hated it. The clothes horses seemed unaware of the chaos and clearly
didn’t think that they ought to play any part in the disciplining of their
children. Dad and I glowered into our swiftly consumed pints and the staff
offered the sagely advice of avoiding Friday afternoons in future.
Children in pubs, this is one of my
biggest bugbears, pubs are adult environments, for adults. I don’t ruin it for
them by making the playground unwelcoming; the pub is my playground and they
are effectively breaking the slide and smashing the swings when they enter a
pub. How can I enjoy the sticky carpet, the company of the unhinged and the
extortion in a child-friendly pub?
I know my stance will horrify and
offend some, thankfully those known to me will be too busy with their offspring
to read that I watch You’ve Been Framed purely to see children falling over and
hurting themselves, it’s my rather benign revenge.
Tim Mac
No comments:
Post a Comment