How and why children are embarrassed by their eternally immature parents…

The currently immature cover for my Apple MacBook…

I have a creative chum with a good sense of humour. 

Last week, her 11-year-old daughter told her reprovingly – though still affectionately – “You have such an immature sense of humour…” 

Or she might just have said: “Mum, you are so immature…”

At my age, memories, reality and imagined conversations have a tendency to overlap. 

And why not? Does it matter, really?

What ROUGHLY happened in the past is usually, pretty much, good enough.

But my point is…

Throughout my life, I have always tried to stay immature. I think it can be a positive quality. And I think, like most appallingly old people, I feel I am only around 26 years old inside. Other age fantasies are available and it seems I am fantasising younger than most.

A week ago, I got a pitch from a PR company claiming:

“Despite legal adulthood starting at 18, new research has found that the average Brit doesn’t consider themselves a grown up until they pass 30… 95% of Brits believe that it’s important to embrace your ‘inner child’.”

• 16-29 yr olds believe you’re officially a grown up at age 24 

• 30-44 yr olds believe you’re officially a grown up at age 30 

• 45-49 yr olds believe you’re officially a grown up at age 33 

• 60+yr olds believe you’re officially a grown up at age 36

…and, according to the research, “more than a quarter of us aren’t sure we will ever grow up!”

The PR pitch was for the biscuit Jammie Dodgers (other biscuits are available) which apparently is currently “encouraging shoppers to #WitnessTheMischief through its latest (so far unseen by me) campaign”.

Jammie Dodgers marketing pitch is attempting to  target the ‘young at heart’…

The research commissioned by Jammie Dodgers also found that more than a third of adults (36%) felt they are less mature than their own children and that, far less surprisingly, “of the adults surveyed who have children, over half (56%) have been told that they’re embarrassing parents.”

The survey claimed a definitive list of signs that you are embarrassing your kids includes “watching cartoons (39%), licking the bowl when baking (34%), finding farts funny (24%), getting excited when you’re having chips for tea (23%) and eating your favourite biccie in your own special way, like taking it apart and eating the filling first (34%).”

The last, I suspect, may not be entirely unrelated to Jammie Dodgers’ sponsorship. The one about getting especially excited ahead of chip consumption just mystifies me.

The research also claims that 42% of ‘adults’ insist that millennials will NEVER grow up the way their parents’ generation did – though surely all generations believe that. More than one in ten (13%) admit they still don’t feel like a grownup, with 34% admitting they feel jealous of friends and family who seem to ‘have their lives together’.

The most cited signs of being a ‘grown up’ are:

• having children (52%)
• making a will (41%)
• having savings (34%)
• having a mortgage (32%)
• getting married (30%)
• knowing about politics (26%)
• hosting a dinner party (21%)
• reading the Sunday papers (16%)

Each to his own, I say, though there are some people I might not want to live with:

The nation’s Top 10 favourite ‘pranks’ are, apparently:

1. Jumping out at someone and shouting Boo!
2. Using an extra or different remote to sneakily change the TV channel
3. Prank calling a mate
4. Scaring someone with fake insects or snakes
5. Whoopee cushions
6. Replacing family photos with famous people
7. Removing batteries from devices
8. Putting clingfilm over the toilet seat
9. Telling your children the WiFi is down when it isn’t 
10. Changing the clocks 

Hell, it seems, really IS other people.

Meanwhile, on Twitter…

“Fourteen year old girls in these places are total sluts mate,” said the financier

The extract I posted a couple of days ago from my Edinburgh Fringe chat show – about attitudes to rape – provoked quite a few comments. Three in particular struck me as particularly illuminating, The first was a Facebook comment from Adrienne Truscott who won the 2013 Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality and the 2013 Fosters Comedy Awards panel award  for performing her show Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! She wrote:

Adrienne Truscott’s show was Edinburgh sell-out

Even statistics about rape focus on women or the victims of the rape, when it would be much more productive to lessening rape by accruing statistics on rapists, and addressing that behavior, as that could actually be preventative.

There is rarely any other area of society, its ills or its triumphs, wherein men are not given full responsibility and credit for their behavior and its effects – the tradition of making women responsible for men’s sexuality is deeply historical.

I’m not saying only men rape. But, on the other hand, male victims are rarely accused of ‘asking for it’. The emphasis on this ‘asking for it’ discussion of how and why rape occurs belies a predisposition, as far as I can tell.

If women change their behavior accordingly – you know, started wearing ill-cut suits or figure-obscuring caftans, dowdy hairdos, no make up and tee-totalling – should we expect and rejoice in the sudden, brilliant absence of rape?

You know, like in India….

Another reaction to my blog, which had quoted three women taking part in my Edinburgh chat show, was this Facebook response:

Having had a daughter attacked by a moron when she was doing nothing more than walking home on a late December afternoon dressed appropriately (because apparently, according to my sisters above, a woman is responsible for being attacked if she wears anything less than full body armour) I am totally dismayed by both the garbage that has come out of their mouths and the fact that they are holding women accountable for the bad things that happen to them – I really hope that they never experience that stomach churning, leg collapsing, brain disintegrating moment when you are told your child has been seriously assaulted by some man!

I don’t think it is something that you ever ‘get over’ as it hits your inner core of belief in other human beings and in particular that we are innately good to each other. Worse things happen on a daily basis all over the world to women and children and of course men. But that doesn’t actually help, in the sense that this violence is an everyday occurrence everywhere.

The third response which interested me was this from comedian Leo Kearse:

Role model for financier

I used to be a criminal intelligence analyst and we generally approached crimes looking at the victim, offender and location to see what could be done to each to reduce crime. Fine for most crimes but rape doesn’t work like that; you can’t analogise it to a laptop being left next to an open window.

In my opinion, it’s mainly caused by men’s attitudes.

I shared a car with two ‘lads’ a fortnight ago.

One of them was a total fanny: a city financier who kept banging on about all the deals he’d done and who gave me all this unsolicited advice about ‘branding’ myself as a comedian.

He then bragged about his sexual exploits and told us that, up until his early 20s, he and his mates would go to care homes (kids who are taken off their parents by the state end up in these homes) because “14 year old girls in these places are total sluts mate”.

What shocked me wasn’t just that he did all this; it’s that he felt that this was ‘cheeky lad’ behaviour and he could brag about it to a stranger even though he was bragging about being a member of a predatory nomadic paedophile gang.

I’m pretty sure this used to be something men would not brag about.

I told him he was a predatory paedophile like Jimmy Savile and then we didn’t speak to each other much.

I think it does reflect a common attitude otherwise he wouldn’t have felt like he could brag about it in front of me.

Lies, damned lies and Census statistics: there are too many foreign immigrants here in Britain…

I wrote a blog a couple of months ago about how Britain is full of immigrants.

Well, last night, I filled in my Census form.

I didn’t mind doing it, but a friend of mine was more incensed than Censused because her father was in the British Armed Forces and they lived in a variety of other countries around the world as well as the UK, employed by Her Majesty’s Government.

My friend was born in Malta. Her brother was born in West Germany.

The Census form, which partly aims to get figures for immigration and to see how many non-Britons are living in the UK, has buggered it up good and proper and the figures on which the government bases its future social policies will be wrong.

The form asks Were you born abroad? There’s no category for British citizens born abroad, let alone the children of British Forces born abroad while their fathers and/or mothers were  sometimes risking their lives for Britain. So an Italian born in Rome will appear in the statistics on an equal footing with a British passport holder born abroad – both will count as foreigners who entered this country to stay here.

The form also asks, in effect, when you first moved to the UK full-time. My friend’s father’s last posting abroad was in West Germany, so the answer to this question might be 1973. Or it might be 1958, a couple of years after she was born and first came ‘home’ from Malta; but that was not permanent residence.

As far as the Census figures will show, she (born in Malta) and her brother (born in Germany) will be two non-British people who became foreign immigrants into the UK.

In fact, by anyone’s standards, they were two British people – technically “Forces’ dependents” – returning to Britain.

And don’t get my friend talking about other ways in which the children of Forces’ personnel are disadvantaged – “I feel like a stranger in my own land,” she says. “Always have done. Probably always will.”

She once applied for a clerical job with a defence industry company in the UK but was turned down – after at first being accepted – because the company said it could only employ people born in the UK.

She presumably counted as a security risk because she was not “British”, despite the fact her British father served in the British Armed Forces and she was born in a British military base.

So these bloody foreigners have been coming over here, stealing our jobs and getting free healthcare for years, haven’t they? Not just children of the British Armed Forces but all those bloody Indian immigrants  – like Cliff Richard (born in Lucknow) and Joanna Lumley (Srinagar).

It’s been going on for years. The place has been inundated by Indian immigrants – There’s that one who starred in Gone With The Wind – Vivien Leigh (born in Darjeeling, lived in Calcutta), comedian Spike Milligan (born in Ahmednagar and he became so pissed-off with not being considered “British” by Whitehall bureaucrats because of his birthplace that he eventually took Irish citizenship)… and then there’s that bloody foreigner LibDem MP Paddy Ashdown (born New Delhi).

They should all have been sent packing back to where they came from. Back to… err… erm…

And let’s not even mention that dodgy cross-dressing comedian bloke from terrorist-friendly Yemen – Eddie Izzard (born in Aden)

Or William Makepeace Thackeray (Calcutta).

So who is British?

Now there’s a question.

One that the Census won’t adequately answer.

In fact, one that the Census figures will mis-represent.