The News

About a thousand years ago, when I first moved to London and lived in a damp ridden maisonette on the Wandsworth Bridge Road, before children were even invented, I decided one day that I was going to take an interest in The News! Bird flu was massively prevalent at this time and I was advised by The News to stock up on no- perishable goods as this might be an epidemic and people had got it. Duly, I rushed out, after work of course, to my local supermarket and stocked myself up with tins and water and other such non-perishables. I can't quite tell you what it was I had bought as it was a total panic buy. I filled my Mini so the wheel arches caressed the tyres and drove home in excess of about 6 miles per hour. Upon reaching the homestead I was greeted by a very confused flatmate who gently asked me "WTF are you doing?". I told him that bird flu was coming and we needed to take every precaution, whilst spitting out the heavily-laden plastic bags I had between my teeth. It was at this moment he banned me from watching the news. 

Unfortunately, the world turns, we have children, we get older, and then at 11 O'clock on a Sunday morning one finds oneself searching for Radio 4, it just seems to fit. Best friend pulls out her phone and says "we might be in time to catch Desert Island Discs!" Hooray! Somehow we've time-warped into middle age. Happens to the best of us. 

Whenever I am in the car after husband has been in it, it's always on Radio 4, he seems to be able to listen to the news and filter out what is true and what is hearsay. I can't. For instance, he told me that the jet stream had broken and we were moments away from the next Ice Age/death. I believed this, had made and remade my will in my head, then cancelled it as nothing mattered we were all dead anyway. I had moved the girls from school to school and then to home-tutoring in my mind, then that didn't seem right either as doom was already upon us. Then one night, at a dinner party everyone was talking knowledgeably about such things, and I piped up that it mattered not, as the jet stream was broken and we were all, for want of a better word, fucked. Husband then piped up "no dear, I got that wrong, I meant to tell you but totally forgot!" I have been banned from listening or reading the news remember, so how the hell was I supposed to know? Awkward. Pretty sure the conversations anmongst couples, other parents like myself, would have gone something like this "Quite a character that Marelka!?"

"Oh Yes, how so?"

"Well, not only was her food inedible, she literally knows nothing."

"indeed!"  

This is relevant to children how? I hear you ask. Well, Michael Gove seems to be calling an awful lot of the shots at the moment, an awful lot that seem to directly affect us and our children, and I'm not entirely sure if I agree. Why should our children go to school at 4? They're so little, and they literally couldn't care less. What they learn in the class, they usually forget in the class, or just after, at play time, seems futile. They can't go on summer holidays when we want, because they might miss something that they later forget. If we take them out of school to learn social skills and real life, their parents might not be able to work and create more tax for our disheveled slightly less struggling country. We're not churning out geniuses, we're churning out bored children who want nothing more to do with the system because they've been in it for so long, they just "wanna be free, we wanna get loaded", except children don't even seem to want to do that anymore, they just want to communicate via the internet and, if unlucky, be targeted by older people who've previously got too loaded.

If Radio 4 is on in the car and they're discussing the latest child that's gone missing and been murdered by their mother or the most recent rape/bombing/disastrous situation, I turn over. Don't want my children to have to witness that. It's the same with adverts for the latest must have plastic fantastic shite that bedecks most of our houses. If they happen to be watching Channel Five for example, which they never are, as husband becomes enraged, we have to turn off or over. This type of news, that there are things like this out there, is not what we want our children to know. Heaven forbid they should start whingening about something that they only imagine to be good. 

There is, however, another side to News. For instance, if we're watching a film on the idiot box and an advert comes on for Unicef, Oxfam, NSPCC or The RSPCA I try hard to allow them to watch it so I have it as a reference point when I am flushing their heads down the loo for spilling something on the carpet or such like

"Maaaaaameeeeeeee! You're so mean!"

"You could be Myles from the advert, noone would come while you cry out from your cot, at least I'm here!" or something like that. Makes them see that actually I'm not the worst mother in the world, Myles's mother was probably a little bit worse.  

It seems to me, that the world is an adversely cruel place, and most of this generates from childhood. My poor children. Perhaps, and I am no politician or bank of knowledge (see paragraph 3), I really try never to profess to be. But I would like this to change. I would like the news to rain down good news and things that my children can aspire to and embrace. I'd like The News to occasionally say "you go off and enjoy your family summer holiday whenever you like, that way you won't feel like the holiday companys have you over a barrel whilst your children demand ice cream and water parks." I'm not saying that I want the government to relinquish the responsibility of my children for most of the weeks of the year, that'd be awful, where would I put them? I'd like there to be an alternative News Channel for me and my children, one where we hear about Bob saving Mavis' feline from getting it's paw stuck in a gold top milk bottle that the happy milkman left there about 30 minutes before. And Allan, from Dundee, has been given the freedom to mow his lawn at any time of the day or night because all his curtain twitching neighbours have collectively decided to go on cheap family holidays all round the globe. And this week noone is falsely accusing anyone of rape because they are a celebrity, instead they are all using their time to find sponsors for the three legged charity race. It's got to be worth a shot, hasn't it?