The disastrous ‘gender reveal’ party is one US fashion we can do without
What gender is signified by orange? I ask because of the photos from San Francisco, where the sky has turned Armageddon-orange thanks to a huge, raging wildfire. Thought to be the biggest in California’s history, it was started by a firework at a so-called “gender reveal party”.
For those ignorant of this American fashion, a “gender reveal party” is a gathering at which soon-to-be parents reveal the sex of their beloved foetus. Really stylish parents now do this in a “creative” way: cutting into a cake to reveal pink or blue icing; blasting coloured confetti out of a cannon or giving out coloured scratch cards – like a sort of reverse lottery; each ticket guaranteed to cost you a fortune.
Unfortunately, some parents are just too creative for their own good. Three years ago, an off-duty border guard in Arizona decided to reveal the sex of his baby by
Unfortunately, some parents are just too creative for their own good
firing a gun at an exploding target set up on a parched, summer grassland. The target let out some blue smoke – and a huge ball of fire that went on to devour 45,000 acres of forest and cause $8million-worth of damage.
Determined not to learn from this fiasco, some super-cute couple in
California have now set off exactly the same kind of disaster in almost exactly the same way. So far, 21,000 people have had to evacuate their homes.
It makes one pine for the days when the sex of a baby was revealed in a more modest way: with the purchase of a christening gown, the entailing of a vast fortune or, in the touching manner of Henry VIII, by the decapitation of its mother. At least back then, the child couldn’t make a mockery of the whole thing by declaring themselves to be “nonbinary” 15 years later.
For the first time
since lockdown I watched Prime Minister’s Questions from inside the House of Commons chamber. The place was freezing. Without all the warm, damp aerosols released by ranks of bellowing MPS, the chamber couldn’t stay warm. Covid, as we know, thrives on cold surfaces. Fortunately, next week’s Brexit bill debate is bound to heat everything up again.