WTF is it with people and their kids. Last night in the shop we had a woman with a three(ish) year old boy on the shop floor and she let him run riot around the shop to the point where it was all I could do to stop myself telling her to f*** off out of it. He took the baskets we use for people to put their shopping in, scattered them all over the shop, used them as a sled to ride around the shop, put them on his feet and did every thing but go for a crap in them. He knocked stuff of shelves ran around the shop screaming and shouted in rage if anyone so much as atttempted to restrain him. The woman for her part felt that all that was needed was to shout at his screaming voice (where ever it happened to be coming from) while she atempted to make the difficult decision as to whether to buy a pound of Galaxy chocolate, or a pound of Cadbury's. At no point did she see the need to heave her 24 stone bulk to whatever part of the shop he was destroying and actually restrain him by hand. When I attempted to take a basket from him that he was driving into the shelf displays she looked at me as though I was trying to cut his throat in an act of ritual slaughter. In the end the situation resolved itself when he left the shop under his own steam and I politely said to her "Is your child alright going out into the road on his own." At that point she developed the speed of a racing greyhound and dissapeared to be seen no more - hopefully for good.

This phenomena is not unusual. The idea that everybody else must be as indulgent with a child as it's besotted parents seems to be the order of the day and undoubtedly some parents even revel in the chaos their children are causing in public places. What they fail to realise is that shop enviroments can be dangerous. There is large amounts of heavy stock being shifted from place to place and a small child does not fare well with three hundred weight of stock on its head. And this is not the all of it. How many weak innefectual people have I seen come into that shop bawling and screaming at their poor cowed children just because they are the only thing on the planet that has to, or will, take it from them. They come to the till to spend £30 on scratch-cards, booze and fags and then rage when the child picks up a twenty pence chewee bar. They shout to the world "Look at me - I've got kids. I'm the one in controll here, and being a mother is sooo stressfull!" Never mind that the only work they ever did was to lie on their backs with their legs in the air for ten minutes and we've all been paying the bill for it ever since. The idea that a child has to be physically restrained untill it is old enough to understand verbal commands eg by 'reins' or holding it's hand, seems to be lost in the lazy vacuousness of modern parenting. 'Discipline' has become a dirty word and we have and continue to produce children who have no idea of what it means to exercise self-restraint on their own lives - and one day (if it is not already) society will pay the price for this.

In Tesco's ( I did a short stint working there as a shelf-stacker) I always remember a woman coming down the isle calling out "Byron! Byron! Behave yourself Byron!" I thought to myself that she clearly had no idea of whom she had named her wayward son after and would no doubt reap full 'Byronic' returns as the years went by. And snacking, What is that all about. Is that what used to be called 'eating between meals' and deeply frowned upon in my parents day. Again in Tesco's I remember hearing a 20 stone women turning to her porcine children and saying "Right - we've got the meals sorted out, now what do you want for snacking on." Tempted as I was to suggest a bag of lemons I kept a judicial silence. Day in and day out I witness obese parents feeding their children on nothing but a diet of coke, pizzas, pot noodles and pringles. And I'm talking barely more than infants. It is no suprise whatsoever to me that cases of 'malnutrition' in children recorded in hospitals are at a higher level than at any other time in the last eighty years. These parents cannot feed themselves let alone make the right dietary choices for their kids. What is going on in a house when someone has to come out at 10.45 pm to buy a tin of baby food. Is that, "Oh shit - I forgot to buy any food for the baby at all - better go get a tin" or something like that? Is that not frightening?

Haircuts and tatto's are another thing. Why do parents eem to need to make their children become little clones of them selves. Dad, shaven head and 'Engerland!' t-shirt; ditto ten year old son. They stand glaring beligerantly over the till side by side for all the world like those stupid 'nodding dogs' you see in the back of car windows. It seems to be the parents greatest desire to instill their own sense of anti-social irresponsibility into the child at the earliest possible instant. The latest craze is to have a v shaped block of hair extending from the nape of the neck up over the crown. It is all I can do to stop myself from saying "Excuse me mate - I think you've got a fanny crawling up the back of your head." Match magazine - a kids football magazine regularly comes with a fake 'tattoo sleve' for your kid to pull up over his arm to make him look lihe Vinnie Jones or Wayne Rooney. Why don't they throw in a couple of 50 yo hookers and a schoolgirl to 'roast' as well. Please learn parents - your kids will become anti-social parasites in their own good time without your encouragement, so let it be. In the meantime if I never clap eyes on one of the blighters again - it will be too soon!

Last Thursday I made a visit to my local library. I had been on a website and had come across the opening paragraph of Herman Melville's classic novel 'Moby Dick'. Inspired by the prose of that small sample I decided to read the book in full and thus my afore mentioned visit.
I first searched for the book on the computer terminal in the hallway - well that is I would have had not the screen informed me that the search contained terms that were outside the library's 'acceptable use policy' - must have been the word dick I guess - so I proceeded to the desk where two women were buisily engaged, one with a magazine and the other with a mobile phone into which she was texting something of no-doubt national import. After a brief wait while it registered that someone was at the desk one of the women asked if she could help me. " I'd like a copy of 'Moby Dick' please" I said.
The woman tapped away at a keyboard, looked puzzled, tapped some more, clicked with a mouse a few times and then finally looked pleased. Turning to her workmate she said "Have you had trouble logging in today?" to which her friend replied in the affirmative. "Now, what was it you were after?" she said, returning to me, the complex problem of logging in having been resolved. "Dick", I replied (no I didn't - I just thought it was funny.) With some irritation now beginning to creep in I was perhaps a little sharper in my reply than normal. "Moby Dick". "Ah yes", she said and once more we began the tapping game. "How would Large Print be?", "Fine", "It's out on long loan - due back in October."
I breathed out through my nose and said slowly "Have you anything to hand; a small print version, even an audio one would be ok." She looked again. "It's not much in demand", she said apologetically, "I think you're out of luck". "Never mind - I'll just have to cast my net a little wider." She winked at me in a conspiratorial manner "Be carefull what you catch".  I was tempted to reply "Well, it won't be Moby Dick will it!", but refrained. My library is pretty centrally positioned so I thought I'd run over to a nearby large bookstore and buy one of those cheap 'Wordsworth' editions for a couple of quid that bookshops sell of out of copyright classics. On the way out of the library I noted that there were three copies of Katie Price's (aka ex page 3 model Jordan) latest ghost written novel (everything else about her is fake from her marriages to her t*t's - why should her novel be any different) with which I could console myself if I chose. Ariving at Waterstone's I went to the section where the cheap classics were normally kept only to discover that they were no longer stocking these cut-price ranges. I could still purchase the book in a glossy Penguin edition for £8.99 or a hardback copy for £17.99.  I turned away thwarted at the last. I would have to make do with what I could dig up at home. Perhaps Frank Frazetta's "Death-Dealer: Prisoner of the Horned Helmet" would be worth another read. Give me culture, but.........no - 'but' nothing! Give me culture full stop - I'm certainly not going to bloody well pay for it!

I fear for the Olympic opening ceremony. If last Mondays 'Queens Jubilee Concert' was anything to go by we are in for the most excruciating few hours of national shame ever to be foisted onto a people by it's govenors. Dig your hole now is my advice - the ground may need a bit of help swallowing all of us at once.

What went wrong you may ask. Well, aside from the questionable wisdom of making an 86 yo woman sit through three hours of ancient rock and pop music out in the cold it's difficult to know where to start. The presenters is as good a place as  I suppose. To put (supposedly) cutting edge comedians in as link artists between the acts was folly in the extreme. They could not perform their normal material that (supposedly) makes them funny because it is pepered with F words and obscenity and they could not make the palsied matereal they were given (or allowed) anything other than embarrasing to watch. They were emasculated to a one by the setting and should not have touched it with a barge pole. The spectacle of Rolf Harris trying to get the crowd to sing 'Two Little Boys' as a time filler will ever be seared into my shuddering memory - but ten out of ten to the old trooper for having a go; a true proffesional even if he does have a pencant for over schmaltzy sentiment. Peter Kay gave sighns of being alive, but only just and similarly Lenny Henry.

But for me the main problem was the artists them selves. We were treated to a fistfull of aged performers battleing to belt out thier oldie hit songs in the way they did forty years ago and failing miserably. They croaked the high notes; they avoided them altogether if they coud, thereby ruining the songs; they swivelled thier arthritic hips with barely concealed groans of pain as they pretended to be young again for a day. There was not the one of them that you didn't want to sit down with a mug of coco and put a blanket across thier knees. Elton John, Paul McArtney, Cliff Richard - do your self respect a favour and never - never - set foot on a stage again. Notable exeptions here were Tom Jones who sounded as good as ever and (amazingly) Grace Jones whose hip swivelling skills would have put a Bankok ladyboy on the catwalk to shame. Stevie Wonder could just about pass muster and JLS did what they do tolerably but Gary Barlow and Cheryl Coles almost complete abcence of talent when away from the tweaked world of the recording studio was clear for all to see.

Now the point is this. All this was ok to us and even bought a lump to our throats because we know these people. These are our institutions, our history. It will not however cut it with the rest of the world. What we can forgive in the rose tinted wash of our sentimentality on our Queens day, will not do for the rest of the world. I read aghast that Sir Paul McArtney is to close the opening ceremony of the Olympics. (Noooo!!..........echoing away down into the pit of pre-disaster anticipation) No - this will not do. China gives the world 50,000 people choreographed to almost automaton levels of synchronicity and complexity with men with jet packs flying all over the arena and we offer up Paul McArtney. Please guys - please! Do not do this to us! We do ceremony better than any country in the world (exept perhaps the yanks) - let us do what we are good at. Or perhaps even better - do nothing at all. I mean it. Do nothing - scale it back to zilch rather than stage a fiasco of past it rock stars and ill prepared kids and comedians for the world to laugh at. We deserve better.