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...)

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

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 ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog