The strange case of Frock Shock

I’ve met loads of kids.

I even was one once (a considerable time ago) and they are fantastically non-judgemental, and accepting of stuff adults find odd.

We are born without prejudice, or pre-conceptions about the actions of others. As a toddler, it’s a fantastical world of getting fed, having a snooze, exploring all sorts of interesting bits of yourself with your fingers, and getting someone else to clean up after you.

After a while, the little ‘uns start taking on board the actions of those immediately on-hand. It’s only at this point that they start viewing others as perhaps doing something wrong or naughty, and begin the process of approving/disapproving of others.

These attitudes are based on the grown-ups they’re in contact with. Fine and dandy, until you realise that those with a few more years on the biological clock sometimes have opinions and views that aren’t necessarily good, or kind, ones.

A 5-year old boy called Romeo Clarke was recently barred from after-school club, because he likes wearing princess dresses. With 4 older sisters, he is immersed in a world more usually associated with girls.

But was he banned because his nice pink dress was dangerous? Was the after-school club (affiliated with a Church) bold enough to come out and say that God disapproves of that sort of thing on gender-specificity grounds? Maybe he was causing headaches with the bright pink fabric? (Romeo, not God – he/she can wear what the hell they like.)

No. Romeo can’t go to after-school club because he is, apparently, ‘confusing’ the other children.

I suspect that the real answer lies in the old-fashioned attitudes of those in charge, and has little to do with confused kids. Young people tend to be pretty smart and naturally inquisitive, as anyone who has tried to answer a “why is the sky blue?” kind of question will attest; Supply a logical answer, even if it’s wrong, and it will be accepted.

Even if they were ‘confused’, why would that be? Because they have been educated by adults who tell them that only girls can wear dresses? Times have changed a lot. If I’d worn one of my pink, floral, shirts and had a ‘man bag’ at school, I’d probably have spent even more time having my head flushed down the nearest toilet.

Happily, the world is getting more enlightened. What you wear doesn’t really make a blind bit of difference to who you are as a person, so why should it matter? The unfortunate flip side to that argument is that our young people are sponges to the moist, and sometimes cruel and unpleasant, flood of attitudes that seep out of us older, and allegedly wiser, influencers.

So if this after-school club’s small people are ‘confused’, it’s only because they’ve been made that way by the bigger ones. Without those influences, they’d probably all be having a fine time jumping off cushions, or painting stick people, right this second.

Maybe it’s the grown-ups that are confusing...

Hopefully, this post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column , in the North West Evening Mail, on the 16th of May 2014. Following last week's straight-to-the-archive appearance on their website, this one hasn't appeared at all, meaning the most recent one of mine on their main blog page is the Atari excavation story from three weeks ago.

I'm not entirely happy with this column. I was trying not to come out (Ha!) and say that church after-school clubs are run by over-zealous religious types, who see "that sort of thing" as being against God's wishes. In doing so, I suspect I never really nailed my ire at the stupidity of all this. Gah. I'm off to put my Wonder Woman outfit on...

(Great, recently acquired, 3CD set of lesser-heard 80's 12" mixes on the go at the moment, in the form of 'Blank & Jones Present So80s 8'. A song by Cretu, before he turned into Enigma? Splendid! A version of Ultravox's 'Dancing With Tears...' I've never heard before? Fab!! Men Without Hats' 'Pop Goes The World' Dance Mix? Awesome!!! Tiffany? Um...)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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