Disgusting: Nothing But Repeats

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Today’s post title comes from the popular British pastime of complaining about the telly; in particular, the summer telly.  We didn’t have a summer, of course – a repeat of a different kind – but we had lots of repeats on the telly. 

I’m sorry: I don’t mean to keep repeating ‘repeat’.  Or ‘telly’.

I never understood why the BBC and ITV repeated everything; and then I started blogging. 

Sometimes it is accidental, telling a story that I’ve told before, but in a slightly different way.  On tv, it happens in soap operas, where everybody sleeps with everybody else and they all work in the same place, drink in the same pub (even respectable old ladies who’ve taken the pledge get their daily lemonade fix from the Rovers or the Queen Vic at a quarter of their weekly pension instead of buying a 21pence 2L bottle from Morrisons that will last them a week) and live out the same dramas – I give you Kevin & Sally Webster: how many times have they been married, cheated on each other, split up and got back together again?  I know it’s a lot, and I haven’t watched Coronation Street for ten years.

Sometimes it’s a re-hash of stuff: I lift bits from other blogs, websites, emails – always crediting the source, of course.  In tv, it’s the inevitable 1000 Greatest TV Ads/100,000 Greatest TV Shows/1,000,000 Greatest Talking Heads Desperate For Any Kind Of TV Appearance So Long As It Keeps Them In The Public Eye And Funds Their Kids’ And Seven Stepkids’ From Four Previous Marriages Expensive Education.

Then there’s the outright We’re tired; we’ve nothing new for you; look at this old stuff instead repeat.  In tv, it’s Murder, She Wrote.  In this blog, it’s one of my earliest posts, tarted up.  Enjoy (R).

*

Eight year old Spud came out of school one day and asked me, ‘What’s a tw*t?’ (The * is an ‘a’: you must be clear on that to make sense of the story).  Once I had regained my balance, I asked him where he had heard it.

‘Oh, Mrs Taylor used it on one of the boys.’

Clutching the school gate as I staggered, I explained what an awful word it was and how he must NEVER EVER EVER use it.  It was a bad word and I would be having a word with Mrs Taylor.  I was surprised at Mrs Taylor, was he sure he had heard her correctly?

On the way home I got the full story from him.  It appears that Mrs Taylor is affectionately abusive to the children, calling them ‘daft twits’.  I suspect that either Spud misheard it or she had a slip of the tongue and ignored it, hoping the children wouldn’t notice.  What really tickled me was when Spud climbed into bed with me at midnight that night, crying that he couldn’t sleep because he had been ‘accidentally very naughty’ because he thought it was such a great word he had used it all afternoon on his friends….

I had to go into school next day and pre-emptively apologise to the Head before the parents’ complaints came rolling in.  I’m so glad I stopped having children.

*

If you want to read stories on a similar theme, visit Tinman’s post, Little Ears.  Read the comments as well.

Back To School

I am one sad mother today: Spud has gone back to school.  It’s not that I miss him; what I’m going to miss is the sound of no alarm clock in the mornings.  Not that I get up late in the holidays – I can’t, I’m an early to bed early to rise kinda gal – but I like not waking up an hour before it’s due to go off, terrified that I’ll sleep so heavily I’ll sleep through it and Spud will be late for school and that will ruin his day his week his life and he won’t visit at Christmas and I’ll never see the grandchildren I don’t want.

 

Here he is, second left.

Incredibly, there was no drama: school mornings have always been a bit iffy with Spud.  His first day back after Christmas 2004 lasted just two hours.  I was called to collect him because he was so white they lost him when they handed out drawing paper, and he spent the week in bed.  When  he finally returned to school he was upset at being put on a table with a bunch of children he either disliked, who misbehaved, or who distracted him from his work.  At the age of nine he took school very seriously.  I had a word with his teacher and she moved him.  One of the advantages of being an obliging volunteer parent in school (that was the week I removed excrement from children’s shoes) was that teachers felt obliged to accommodate me; not that I wouldn’t complain anyway, if my boys were unhappy at school.  Or in their jobs, when they leave uni: you come and tell your Mum, son, and I’ll sort out those nasty customers/managers/villains/MPs.

I remember that school year quite vividly, paticularly Parent’s Evening.  He was given a glowing report, telling us – you don’t mind me boasting? – how mature and responsible he was and that he was in the top sets for everything and that he had a fabulous sense of humour.  One of his teachers had asked his class teacher to be sure to tell us that he was even funny in PE, although his class teacher wasn’t sure how.  We asked him about it afterwards and the only thing he could think of was that ‘I usually trump loudly when I do roly-polies.’

 

He was such a cutie pie at that age.  He would use the word ‘beep’ to replace swear words  eg, quoting from the original Italian Job: ‘You’re only supposed to blow the beepin’ doors off!’  He wanted to call his Dad ‘bugalugs’ as a term of affection the other night.  The Hub and I argued over this, because he says ‘bugalugs’ counts as swearing because it derives from the word ‘bugger,’ and I say it comes from having insects in your ears in Ye Olden Days, but, because the Hub was convinced it was swearing, we erred on the side of caution and consequently Spud was not allowed to use the word ‘bugalugs’, just in case. 

One day, he wanted to say to his father, ‘Are you all right, beepalugs?’ 

What he actually said was, ‘Are you all right, buggerbeep?’

PS: Relieved

Sony, intimidated by my threat to mobilise the world, have fixed the problem. Or, to be strictly accurate, the PS3 has fixed the problem itself. Just what we need: intelligent computers. A few tiny steps from sentience and then we’ll have Arnold Schwarzenneggers all over the place.

Let me terminate this topic by telling you that Spud is at this very moment catching up on last night’s playing; I can hear him muttering parent-approved swear words under his breath (blast/fart/crap). He reminds me of his father, who would come home from work in the early days of our marriage and play games on his monochrome screened, 20 megabyte hard driven computer, and scream the foulest language at it. When I asked him why he played them when they had such a deleterious effect on his mood, he replied, ‘Because it relaxes me,’ proving that even back in the Eighties computers were already smarter than some people.