This and that or some such shit: Easter in the nursery

I am feeling rather proud of myself, having just reduced my seven-year-old niece to tears on Easter Sunday. There is, you see, a ban on High School Musical/Hannah Montana bullshit in the house. This ban was my idea, and indeed the condition on which I came home for Easter. After this Christmas, when I very nearly drowned in sentimental bollocks from the Disney Corporation, I flatly refuse to go through that again. I police this very strictly, and have just confiscated a High School Musical soundtrack which was deafening us all. "It's for your own good," I informed the howling spoilt brat. Which indeed it is, as both shows put across an extremely warped and unnatural vision of the world, in which boys are so weirdly asexual that you feel if you pulled down their trousers they'd have no genitals and girls are pretty innocents only concerned with true love. Both demand conformity and condemn imagination. "One day you'll be very embarrassed, and in the meantime if I hear When There Was Me and You one more time I'm going to implode in on myself." I have lost some superiority though having eaten so much chocolate and drunk so much wine I now have such a bad stomach ache I'm lying on the floor in my bedroom, my mother's cat slumbering against me. My niece has recovered sufficiently to be massacring the Harry Potter theme tune on her recorder. Unfortunately there is nothing in the House Constitution which can lead me to ban this too, but something will be figured out before Christmas.

The niece taken care of thusly, it's only fair to point out that the riot shields were out yesterday for the nephews over Doctor Who. Opinion was divided over the quality of the show, an interesting exploration of a bus trip gone very badly, involving flying metallic stingrays, as far as I could tell. I don't know why bus trips must always end up with the flying metallic stingrays, but indeed they must. Is it worth pointing out that the 200 bus doesn't go anywhere near Victoria? It probably isn't. But it doesn't. Welshmen, what can you do. Anyway, aside from a rather confusing change to advertised bus routes and a cavalier attitude to law and order, I didn't think it was at all bad. Lee Evans was a revelation as a nerdy scientist, and wholly balanced out a slightly underwhelming Michelle Ryan who had a thankless character in Lady Christina. It was a jolly adventure, in happy contrast to most of Doctor Who these days, although ended up with a portent of DOOOOM from a psychic lady. "You'll knock four times," she warned the Doctor, which set me and my oldest brother (father of nephews) off on what we considered to be quite an entertaining re-imagining of The Postman Always Rings Twice.


My youngest nephew lapped up the Doctor Who, but the oldest nephew has, since the last time I saw him, morphed into a terrifyingly accurate version of Armstrong and Miller's RAF pilots. My nephew is 11 and goes to a highly respected public school, and consequently has the most cringingly plummy accent you can imagine but has, from influences unclear, picked up extraordinary lingo. "I has parsnips though, innit?" He remarked to my befuddled mother when she tried to give him another roast potato. "Can't have no more carbs though, it's like bad for you innit?" His reaction to Doctor Who was succinctly put: "The effects are totally sick, but it's like, all that exoskeleton shit, what?" No one had the least idea what he was on about, but we all understood the full meaning of "shit" and he was told off accordingly.

Anyway, said nephew poured the most extreme scorn on me when I elected (post-Doctor Who) to watch Primeval. It's worth noting I am a much-youngest child in the family, and consequently have enjoyed until recently far more "one of the gang" relationship with my nephews and nieces than their parents, but finally the generation gap is yawning before me. The contempt doled out by my nephew was astonishing. "It's like a kid's programme," he remarked. "I'm too old for it now, you know?" I'm not. I quite liked it, and truly didn't see the twist (such as it was) coming. I didn't think Primeval had the capacity to surprise. I am now quite intrigued to see a post-Cutter series. This could be the shot in the arm required to boost it somewhere into a dimension where Nephew A could acknowledge its existence.

In the meantime, me and my youngest brother are doing our best impressions of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and Ginger in our capacity as the setters of good examples to our errant young relative. WINE!

If this isn't what Jesus intended for Easter, I don't know what he was on about.