Michael DEACON
After all these months at home, children throughout England are finally about to return to school. For parents, this will come as an overwhelming relief. Officially, this is because we’re terribly concerned that they’ve been missing out on their education. But let’s be honest. Mostly it’s because we’ve completely and utterly run out of things to do with them.
School summer holidays are long enough at the best of times. But during a pandemic they feel even longer. There’s hardly anything on at the cinema. Any kind of travel is a gamble. The beaches are rammed (at least when it’s not raining). Swimming pools and soft play centres have only just reopened (and still feel risky). In short: keeping children occupied has never been more of a bother.
I’ve tried taking my six-year-old son to the park to play football. But each time he swiftly loses patience, thanks to my infuriating inability to remember the rules he has painstakingly set out beforehand. (“That goal doesn’t count! I wasn’t ready! There was something in my sandal! You lose a trillion points! And I get six extra penalties! And I get a point even if they don’t go in!”)
Day trips aren’t much use either. They’re always of far more interest to grown-ups than to children. On our recent holiday in Cornwall we went to a fantastic wildlife centre. I watched seagulls swoop into the penguin enclosure and steal the inmates’ lunch. I watched a pair of ground hornbills have a furious swordfight with their startlingly long beaks. I stared at the flamingos, and wondered, not for the first time, how they could possibly be real. They’re bright pink, their knees are the wrong way round and their beaks are upside down. Everything about flamingos is weird and quaint and topsyturvy. They look like umbrellas designed by Lewis Carroll.
I was fascinated. Not my son, though. Like absolutely all children, he just wanted to go to the play park and the gift shop. If I ran a wildlife centre, or an aquarium, or a museum, or any other kind of family attraction, I’d save money and get rid of all the exhibits. All you need is a climbing frame and a roomful of wildly overpriced stuffed toys. Plus a massive all-day gin bar for the parents. I’d make a killing.
Anyway, not to worry about that. We no longer have to scrape the barrels of our imagination to find things to keep our children quiet, because finally they’re all going back to school.
The holidays are over. At last we can start to relax.
One thing you can do with bored children is park them in front of some kind of screen all day. Feels wrong, though, doesn’t it? Surely it can’t be healthy. Or so we tend to assume. It’s worth remembering, though, that every generation of parents frets neurotically about the supposed dangers of the latest youth trends. Yet these fears almost invariably prove unfounded. And even, in retrospect, rather silly.
On Twitter there’s a fascinating account called Pessimists’ Archive. It tweets cuttings of newspaper articles from decades gone by, in which readers were warned of the dangers posed to the young by such alarming developments as the Sony Walkman, comic strips, jazz, the cinema, the wireless, “hobbies”, and even books. “Books have become the modern narcotic,” thundered one newspaper columnist in 1905.
So perhaps, a few decades from now, today’s parents will look daft for worrying about screen time. Perhaps, by then, it will have been accepted that screens are every bit as educational as books are. Don’t rule it out. When my son was three he pointed at a shape and said casually, “Trapezoid!” I stared at him, bewildered, and then googled “trapezoid”, to see if he was right. He was. Where on earth had he picked that up from? Obviously not from me. From Mama, then? Or maybe nursery? Nope. “It was on TV,” he said. Well, that did it for me. Three years old, and his geometry was already more advanced than mine. And all thanks to the most knowledgeable, reliable and tireless teacher ever born: television.
Who knows, maybe the games my son plays on his ipad are doing him good, too. Maybe instead of rotting his brain, they’re sharpening it. Let’s face it. The jobs of the future – assuming there are any – will all require exceptional digital skills. To a bemused old codger like me, it may look as if my son’s doing nothing more than mindlessly destroying an interminable succession of cartoon aliens. But perhaps he’s actually developing the crucial technological knowhow that will help him become the next Silicon Valley trillionaire.
Fingers crossed.
Andrew Lloyd Webber has made
a thoughtful proposal. To avoid any more rows about Rule, Britannia!, he says, his friend and frequent collaborator Sir Tim Rice could “fix the offending couplet” – ie, the one about slaves and ruling the waves.
An intriguing idea. But just in case Sir Tim is unavailable, I submit the following suggestions.
Try singing them. Each one neatly fits the melody – and the BBC’S world view.
1. “Rule, Britannia! We’ve changed the words at last/ Britain’s very, very sorry for its past.”
2. “Rule, Britannia! An overdue rewrite/ Britons are apologetic and contrite.”
3. “Rule, Britannia! We’re moving with the times/ Here’s a very lengthy list of all our crimes.”
4. “Rule, Britannia! The Proms are at an end/ Britons never, never, never shall offend.”
Michael Deacon on Twitter @Michaelpdeacon; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion