Kids should be seen and heard

It has been a great week for top-flight entertainment value supplied by small children. Including the one who was B-B-C-een but not heard.

Despite clearly not needing their services, I sat in a hairdressers in Kendal for a while last weekend. Before you start calling the local constabulary, I was legitimately there – Mrs. G was getting her barnet coiffed.

Whilst carrying out the thoroughly modern practice of staring at my phone and avoiding eye contact with anyone, I found myself simultaneously trying not to get distracted by an extremely smiley toddler and his adorable slightly bigger sister, who was having her hair cut.

Every time I glanced up, the little chap was grinning at me, or making an attempt to grab my sleeve, whilst his sister chatted happily away.

After the trim was sorted, she decided I clearly needed to pay more attention, and launched into a hysterical explanation, for my benefit, about the deficiencies of her baby bro. She does love him, apparently, but he doesn’t do much apart from crawl really fast and sometime stand up if he’s got something to hold on to. However, the biggest problem seemed to be that “he doesn’t even talk”.

Never mind – happily, she had any conversational deficiencies in that household well and truly covered, along with extreme cuteness.

Meanwhile, Professor Robert Kelly was live on the BBC from his home, giving his professional opinion on events in South Korea. The next 30 seconds have turned him into an internet sensation, as his organised, neat, office was invaded by his children.

And they did it in style. First, his small daughter opens the door and positively swaggers into the room in an arm waving dance frenzy. Marching right up to her now flustered dad and sitting on the end of what appears to be a bed, she successfully knocks a pile of books over whilst he desperately tries to push her back, only for a tiny toddler in a baby walker to shoot in through the door at high speed.

A panicked entrance by their Mum then leads to a wonderful moment of more spilled books and a frenzied attempt to get two children (who don’t want to go) out of a door whilst pointlessly hoping you haven’t been seen.

Shared rapidly round the world, the BBC’s own clip of it on YouTube has already amassed well over 20 million views, and has firmly established itself as a clear front runner for the coveted “Funniest TV news clips 2017” award.

That it also spawned a conversation about why some people assumed the harassed mum was a nanny, simply because she is Asian and the Prof white, is no bad thing either.

Seen but not heard? No thanks – put your phone down, shut the lid on your laptop and unplug the TV – all the entertainment you need is just a couple of small children away.

They’re definitely having fun. We might as well join in. What have we got to lose?

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 17th of March, 2017. You can view the version used by the paper on their website here, which was re-titled as 'Entertainment is child's play'.

Just in case you actually do live under a rock and haven't seen this glorious piece of unscripted brilliance, here it is for you. Since submitting my column on Wednesday, the clip has been viewed another couple of million times, too. And that's just this copy of it.

There has also been an entertaining follow-up interview with the whole family, in which the kids yet again steal the show. Good work, small people. Life is depressing at the best of times - keep up the good work of lightening the mood.

(CD A-Z: Gary Numan's "Dance". Yes, I am pouting.)

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...

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 ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog