Celia Walden

on the perils of play dates;

If there is one thing you don’t do in LA, it’s reprimand another woman’s child with the word ‘no’, which will not only traumatise the little blighter, but also sow seeds for future rebellion

‘Will any frearms in the house be safely locked up?’ Back in London, it’s peanuts the school mums worry about before a play date. But in a country where a child under 12 dies by accidental or intentional gunfre every other day, it makes sense that the AR-15s and the Glock handguns take precedence over that pack of KP Dry Roasted. Not that you ever get used to answering – or asking – the question. ‘Actually, we don’t keep a gun,’ I’ll reassure the Jennifers, the Alishas, the Reneés and the Tifanis with an ‘i’. ‘As Brits, we may not have a Second Amendment, but we do have the right to bare violently discoloured teeth at intruders – and that tends to do the trick.’

There’s a play date-specifc tone I’ve never quite mastered in LA – but I’m getting better at what is basically blind dating without the cocktails or the firting. For one thing, I now know not to serve cocktails. Angelenos need a reason to drink; we need a reason not to, and children are not it. Whereas I’ve long maintained that a single glass of wine turns me into an award-winning mum (suddenly I’m Mrs Tickle Monster, building tents behind the sofa and considerably more excited about the prospect of face-painting than my four-yearold), the general consensus out here seems to be that alcohol impairs your parenting skills.

So there you are, dry as a bone, trying to socially lubricate yourself out of the ‘weird British woman with the movable forehead’ bracket and into some sort of acceptable LA mother-shaped mould, when you see little Emery about to plunge a digit into the one socket you de-childproofed just the day before in a ft of annoyance at not being able to charge your phone anywhere in the house. ‘No!’ you cry, too late (for yourself, not Emery – saved from certain death). Because if there is one thing you don’t do in LA, it’s reprimand another woman’s child, certainly not with the word ‘no’, which as everyone knows will not only traumatise the little blighter, but also sow seeds for future rebellion. So that regrettable firtation with crystal meth in a decade’s time? Your fault.

Just when you think you’ve got the hang of all this sanctimony, just when you’ve understood that at the frst sign of a runny nose a play date needs to be immediately disbanded (and the whole family put on preventative antibiotics), and established that you never ofer to take another’s child to the loo (much less ofer them a pair of your own child’s clean pants when they wet themselves); just when you’ve stopped making small talk about celebs (because ‘Did you see those pictures of Meg Ryan in US Weekly?’ will only ever be countered with ‘Actually Meg’s been a family friend for years’) and googled ‘attention basket’ to discover that unless you fll your child’s ‘AB’ with positive attention at all times, they will most likely marry a stripper and feece the family for all it’s worth, you fy back to Blighty, where children openly roll around in each other’s phlegm on non-hypoallergenic grass, beneath the distracted if not drunken gaze of their parents.

And then you think to yourself, ‘Well, it didn’t do us any harm, did it?’