I have lived in England for 25 days. England is England, I've been here before, I know what it looks like and yes, settling here is not quite the same as visiting, mostly because when you're on holiday you don't need home insurance and landline, broadband, a school and furniture, and you don't need to teach your children that it is not sensible or acceptable to walk into strangers' houses, go upstairs and look around.
People have asked what I see as the biggest difference between South Africa and here and I usually say: Everything. But something has come to my alarming notice and can certainly be placed squarely in the Incomparable Box.
In Forest Hill, London we visited the Horniman Museum. The kids were interested and gave the displays all the attention a five- and two-and-a-half-year-old can muster until their stomachs roar louder than the stuffed walrus. So we queue for a toasted sarmie (I refuse to call it a sarnies) and some coffee. While waiting and then sipping my coffee I was exposed to the most bizarre and utterly hideous scene. At the opposite table a dad and two kids (minimum 6 and 4 but more likely 7 and 5) arrive with their food and drink. Dad is carrying everything; he dumps it on the table and tells the children in a I'm-trying-to-teach-a-Pekingese-English tone to wait while he goes to get the ... high chairs.
Once stuffed into said chairs he then proceeds to open the wrapping on the straws and put it in the foil juice hole, unwrap their sandwiches and cut them into small pieces; they hardly ate a morsel, probably no space due to the pressure of the cross bar on their stomachs or perhaps they felt ill at the sight of it as I did. Then, "now what are we going to have as our special treat for daddy's day out? And remember if we ask for it we must eat it." We? I lost count of the number of times he told them to behave as he went to secure 'our' brownies. How could they misbehave, they couldn't move.
Since then I have made a study of the British 'baby'. In Cheltenham last Saturday I spied a large leg protruding from a stroller, I peeked in and to my horror found a child of school-leaving age staring back. Parents are laden with baby bags and bottles for kids nearing ten and eleven. Bottles hang from the mouths not of babes but of brutes.
Today started rainy so I took my two, five and almost three, to one of those hideous hellholes termed 'multi-leveled soft play' barns filled with screaming children and bustling adults. Regarding the British obsession with Health and Safety I can safely say that the number of adults sitting in the balls basin below a slide, or crouching through tunnels and helping children up child-sized steps and then reaching down for them and hauling them up half-a-meter, was a safety hazard. An alarming, gob-smacking hazard. How will these children ever learn to be confident, and God forbid take a risk, when a parent is forever THERE, aiding, assisting and cautioning.
Comparatively my kids are feral and I'm a negligent mum; I don't react unless the crying or screaming reaches a certain decibel or continues for longer then it takes me to finish my thought (long). A mum called out that a little girl was crying looking around for the mum, no response. Some time later she saw me with my daughter and pointedly remarked, "It was your little girl crying up there." To which I replied, "She seems fine to me." And she was, she was already halfway across the room yelling for her brother.
Give me wild over pampered any day and as they say, twice on Sundays.
