Tag Archives: Cbeebies

The classic British holiday…

Posted on by
3

… or 5 really good things I did on my holidays and 5 potential deal-breakers…

1) The English country wedding
What could be more perfect than starting a holiday with a wedding? 
My cousin got married in a little stone church where everyone knew her, and had a hog roast reception at a specially converted wedding barn in the middle of nowhere (the fantastically named village of Throcking).  My son was a page boy and insisted on carrying a “Just Married” balloon down the aisle behind her, and stripped all his outfit off during the ceremony because he was too hot.  Don’t you just love toddlers? ;)
Fantastic day, lovely to see my family, great to see my cousin (who has always been the closest thing I have to a sister) so happy.
Of course, the location of the wedding limited our options for making use of our week off, so we headed east, to Suffolk…

2) Visiting Castles
Having recently joined English Heritage, my husband is determined to get his money’s worth.  We’ve visited three castles and a ruined abbey within a week.  Fortunately, my son is obsessed with castles at the moment.  At Framlingham (where Mary Tudor was declared queen), we joined the EH Time Travellers.  While a toddler is too little to take part in the mock battles and wild bear hunt,  my son was plenty big enough to paint a shield and was thrilled to get the design he asked for (“a big lion with a tail on!”)  He also ran the ramparts, thrilling for him, a little nerve fraying for me although it is all in good repair.
At Orford castle (pictured) he fell asleep in the car and spent a good 40 minutes asleep on my lap in the main hall.  Waking up there was the Best. Thing. Ever!  He then climbed to the top of the castle, and back down again, on his own little legs.  and slept soundly that night.

3) Southwold
We’ve wanted to visit Southwold for ages, but when we holidayed in Norfolk, it was just a little too much in the wrong direction.  It was worth the wait.  We stayed at the hotel Gordon Brown used on his holiday there (no, we didn’t book for that reason, we didn’t know that until we were leaving!)  My favourite moment was my toddler walking into our room and saying “Ooh! This is lubly!”
It is famous for its rows of brightly painted beach huts, its white lighthouse, the Adnams brewery and its pier, which was only recently completed and is in fact the UK’s only 21st century pier.  Southwold is truly lovely, and although it has the usual middle class beach uniform shops (Fat Face, Joules and a mini-department store stocking Crew and White Stuff) there are also an impressive number of independent stores.  There’s a tiny amber museum and a few more museums that we didn’t go to (no time!) and many happy hours can be spent mucking about on the beach (sandy) and on the pier (the modern ironic amusement arcade is fantastic although too scary for a toddler). 

4) Sutton Hoo
When we told people that we were going to Ipswich over night, most went “why???”  Some people know about the regeneration of the docks area which is really very stylish indeed, but most know it as a bit of a chav town, not really living up to its claim (with Chelmsford) of being the first Anglo-Saxon towns in Britain.
And the proximity to Sutton Hoo, the site of the most important Anglo-Saxon archaeological site in Britain, shows that this last point was an important one.  Sutton Hoo in the rain is basically a big mound of grassy earth at the end of a wheelchair-friendly but muddy path. However it has an excellent visitor centre.  We were a bit disappointed to find it was National Trust rather than English Heritage (by contrast Stonehenge is EH… go figure) so we had to pay the entrance fee but it was worth it.  There’s an excellent film, a really interesting exhibition, drawing tables for kids, a rather alarming “open grave” in the floor with a sandcast of a murdered body within in, and a replica of the longboat in which the Anglo-Saxon hoard and the helmet (here a plastic version is modelled by my husband, the original is in the British Museum in London) was found.
For anyone interested in the dark ages, or in the history of Britain – political or religious because this site is pagan burials with early Christian influences- Sutton Hoo is a must.
The best thing for me was my son’s artwork going up on the wall in the visitor’s centre.  And a slight moment of embarrassment when he told the nice curator that his name is “Baby Bear”…
     

#

5) TV tie-in
And finally… for anyone without a child under 7, this picture will mean little. 
But for Cbeebies fans everywhere, this is a really famous building.  This is Jason Mason’s house in Sunny Sands from “Grandpa in my Pocket”!!!  My son knew it immediately and was thrilled.
If you want to find it, it is in Aldburgh, near the seafront. 

However, as always there are things that disappoint you.
Here’s 5…
1) customer service at reception in the Salthouse Hotel, Ipswich
An error meant that two rooms had been reserved for us.  Rather than check us in, give us the key to one and sorting out the backroom issues later, we were kept waiting a good 15 minutes with our toddler (and the after effects of my food poisoning) in the admittedly stylish reception and almost accused of having reserved two ourselves!  Given this hotel is Alastair Sawday Special Places to Stay-listed,  a sign of quality we’ve never been disappointed by, we were appalled.
Breakfast food and service, the room itself and the extremely helpful porter were excellent.  But the reception experienced tainted it.  

2) customer service at the Crown hotel’s restaurant, Southwold
We had dinner at the Crown Southwold on the first night we were there, and were impressed with the food and service.  We decided to return for our special dinner.  We couldn’t reserve, but thought arriving before 7pm would be fine.  
We got a table without difficulty, but after ordering we waited an hour for our starters (crab on toast with gazpacho, and mushroom and tarragon soup).  Neither dish takes an hour to prepare, there was no explanation, no offer of bread.  We were only grateful that our toddler had eaten beforehand and sat happily in his chair colouring Peppa Pig pictures.  When it finally did arrive, and we were asked if we were enjoying our meal we said well the food is fine but how did two bowls of soup take an hour?
The maitre d’ arrived, all explanation that the restaurant was busy, but no real apology, and certainly no offer to waive e.g. the cost of the starters. The mains arrived very speedily and he personally delivered our desserts (the strawberry pannacotta, strawberries with basil syrup, strawberry and basil sorbet and red basil was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten!), but it shouldn’t be that you have to complain to get reasonable service.  Frustrating, given the excellent service only a few days earlier.  

3) food poisoning from my only non-fish meal in days!
Chicken, perfectly roasted, must’ve had been exposed to bacteria after cooking.  Haven’t been that ill in ages. Not the Crown, in case you were wondering.

4) the behaviour of drivers on the motorway (and frankly most other roads)
You lot!  You’re mad!  As I now have access to sat nav, my attention in the passenger seat is back on the road.  When did it become acceptable not to indicate before moving?  When was it made ok not to look to the right when joining a roundabout?  Aren’t white lines in the centre of the road meant to be to the right of the car, not in the centre? Don’t you know/ care about the £80 fine for talking on your mobile when driving – its not about money-making – you’re endangering others!  Speed limits aren’t a goal or a minimum – on country lanes you need to drive appropriately for the speed of the road even if there’s a “national speed limits apply” sign.  What the HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL???!!! 

5) the M25 (and the Dartford crossing)
In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s “Good Omens” there’s a fantastic sequence where Crowley the demon shapes the M25 into the dark sigil Odegra.  Have you been on the M25 recently?  Journeys that used to take 1.5 hours (like getting to the wedding) now require you to leave up to 3 hours in order to be sure of getting there.  The Dartford tunnel in particular is diabolical at present.  But to add insult to injury, as you crawl across the Dartford bridge, you can see where they are installing speed cameras.  Speed cameras! Our average speed over the bridge was 10 mph!  We didn’t get faster than 20mph!  And this was 3pm, not even rush hour.  Truly dreadful.
Sorting out the mess of the M25 needs to be a national level strategic transport priority.  

But a holiday’s not a holiday if you don’t have something to complain about, after all.  I hope you all enjoy yours as much.

The modern world is bad for children

Posted on by
1

Ok that’s it.  What, exactly, are we meant to do, to be doing the right thing?

         

As you can tell by my ever so slightly fed up tone, today there’s yet another report that say that something that parents do all the time is Bad For The Children. Today it’s television that’s in the firing line.

The article I’ve hyperlinked is fairly self-explanatory.  Children getting fat, eating junk food, have worse IQs in the longer run, etc. etc.  All of these things are apparently the long term impacts of toddler-age television viewing.
The professor in charge of the research says:

“Common sense would suggest that television exposure replaces time that could be spent engaging in other developmentally enriching activities and tasks that foster cognitive, behavioural and motor development.”

Ok.  No normal parent wants their child to miss out on important cognitive, behavioural and motor development skills.  So toddler TV’s got to be eliminated, right?  There must be something wrong with it – it’s illegal in France after all.
 
But let’s just think this through for a minute.
I’ve never seen my child watch TV for longer than about 10 minutes at any one time. 
Much as he loves Cbeebies, the TV’s just not that entertaining for that long when there’s building to be done, beds to bounce on, toy cars to drive up walls making vroom noises rather than just the lovely plastic garage, wax crayons and paper and all the card from the recycling bin to build with… and of course mummy to cuddle, to jump on, to play with, to help sort washing, to help find all the red buttons, to chase the frog across the lawn…

As you can gather, it’s not that my toddler lacks interest in the world around him.  That’s just a small sample of what he gets up to when we spend time at home (as opposed to the time in town, time at playgroup etc. etc.)
Nor does he lack the ability to concentrate, in fact he loves reading and often wants to look through books uninterrupted by me,  telling himself stories about the pictures, for a long time.
But even on what are laughably called my non-working days (unpaid work days more like, unless you count the non-means tested child allowance as payment?), I cannot spend 100% of my time as his playmate.  Nor should I – he also needs to play with other children his own age (hence playgroup to make friends), and to learn to entertain himself.
And sometimes, when I really, really need it, TV can be an electronic babysitter (not for long – my toddler has a kitchen stall designed to help him reach the worksurface safely so he tends to try to join in). 
But mostly we watch it together.
Timmy Time and the Tweenies are great for showing hm that it’s not just him that goes to nursery while his parents work, and the Tweenies teaches stories, nursery rhymes and social interaction, while 3rd and Bird stresses the value of a strong community.  Alphablocks and Numberjacks are so good that primary school teachers often use them in their literacy and numeracy lessons. I’ve never been a fan of In the Night Garden, and Waybuloo is a bit hippy trippy for me, but I like the sign language and normalised treatment of children with special educational needs and physical disabilities in Something Special.  Given the reaction of some parents to Ceri‘s employment, this sort of show is very much needed. 
And we don’t just sit and watch TV -we talk about what’s happening, when something similar happened to us…
 
But this is yet another report that tells us that we’re doing long term damage to our kids.
And while frankly I’d vote for the party that can actually bring the recommendations of “Toxic Childhood” into policy (NB it would involve cost, social change, standing up to the Daily Mail and the older feminists for whom equality is about the workplace), the central theme of that book is implying that parents are not up to the job.

There’s a terrible irony that we are so child centred these days, but that it is in a sort of “quality time“, taxi driving to activities way.  Being with the children takes time - for example, when I ask other parents how they handle the change to available nursery hours when their child turns three, they say I don’t know, I had a second one so I’m at home and able to do the school run, or that they are lucky to have grandparents near by etc.  otherwise they couldn’t work. 

But the child-centred approach that parents have is being squeezed. 
For example, some people I know have had their ability to work and raise their family affected by local authorities that can’t allocate the school places in a way that avoids someone having to drive miles between a school drop off and a nursery drop off. 
For others, it’s been that in order to “get on” – i.e. to be in the running for promotion etc., work has to be full-time – and that means 4 or 5 full days a week at nusery for the bambino, something we’re also told by the childhood experts is not good for children (note how short the school day looks to a parent and you’ll see that has been accepted fact for some time).
 
Long parental working hours are not good for anyone – tired workers are less productive, tired parents that don’t see each other suffer strained relationships not least because being a parent is really very hard work, parents working hours don’t get to see their kids and are not on good form when they do.  The right to request flexible working is genuinely a good thing (supported by all 3 main political parties in the UK) and being allowed to work from home sometimes cuts travel time and therefore means that more time can be spent with a child before and after childcare, and reduced hours means sometimes actually being able to do one leg of a school run rather than trying to get one of the rare paid childminders willing to do both before and after school and who ends up seeing more of the child than the parents do.
But many parents seem to fear that flexble working will impact negatively on their careers, so one parent doesn’t do it and the whole set up just gets even more complicated. 
Some compensate by treating the children as princes and princesses – in other words little monsters that are so used to being indulged that they don’t know what no means, and have been treated that way not necessarily becausse parents mistakenly think that this is what being child centred is, but because they are so damn tired all the time! 

France might think it has it right by banning toddler TV, but few women breastfeed there for fear of ruining their figure and if you are a career woman, your contemporaries expect you to return to work after 12 weeks otherwise you are letting down the sisterhood.
But even in the UK where we value choice, we don’t really value mothers that choose to stay at home to raise the kids in the way the childhood experts recommend for the first two years. 
Or if we do, we make it a choice only available to the middle classes who can just about afford to exist on one income, and the very poor who don’t work at all.
And those that work part-time are at risk of everything crashing if they are not circus-quality jugglers.
And those that work full-time are effectively letting someone else bring up their child.
And the tired, stressed out parents probably let the kids watch TV so that they can relax a bit.
Oh. 

So basically, with an economic set up that expects both parents to work, and a soul-selling attitude to work that – no matter what the lovely words in the HR guidance say – sends a mesage that flexible and part-time models are for slackers that don’t want to get on in their careers, and every moment that the child is with the parent needs to be a learning activity but that learning activities include pairing socks as well as structured play… argh! 
Basically the modern world is bad for children. 
I just don’t know what to do, except hope that trying to bring my son up to be happy, secure, friendly, outgoing etc. etc. in the best way I can is enough.  And try not to add yet another thing to the list of things to be tired over and stressed about…

And this?  My toddler took an unexpected nap and I was quick typing it…

Slop Buckets at the ready

Posted on by
Reply

or why this stupid wasteful attitude needs to stop.  Really.

The Daily Mail today ran an odious story christening kitchen caddies – that’s food waste recycling containers to those of us that don’t yet have them in our homes – “slop buckets”.
The story was about huge fines to be imposed on households that decide not to recycle food waste via a government scheme designed to make it as easy as possible when and if the trial scheme that’s in place at the moment is rolled out nationally.  The article talked about smells, fly and maggot infestations and generally presented a negative image of the initative.

I’m really, really cross about this for several reasons. 

1) Recycling your food waste is NOT a stupid idea
I grew up in the countryside.  We didn’t keep pigs – although actually I remember clearing our plates of food waste at primary school into a scrap bucket for the pigs on one of the local farms.  This was pre-turkey twizzlers, obviously. 
No, we had a compost heap in the garden and we put kitchen scraps into a lidded bucket until we had enough in it to merit a trip up the garden to the compost heap. 
I’m not talking Victorian poverty when I talk about scrap buckets, I’m talking twenty years ago and an activity that’s perfectly normal. 
Food matter rots down – with the help of those flies and maggots – to make a very useful fertiliser to grow guess what?  More food.  Circle of life and all that.  Plants grown in compost grow better, generally, so can have higher yields.  And you can use it to grow your very own organic veg in your garden without what I suspect the Mail considers the rip-off prices of organic in supermarkets (I could go into more complex descriptions but I’m keeping to the Jack and Jill description as it seems that that is all that those involved with the Daily Mail would understand on this issue).
Yes, I know that there are sometimes rats, mice etc. in compost heaps.  Not a big fan of those.  But even in a city there’s supposed to be a rat no more than 6 feet away from you at all times (I think that’s a estimate of reality rather than a new Euroepan Regulation by the way). Point is that they are everywhere, part of life and it would be stupid to send food waste to landfill because you’re afraid of a bit of wildlife.

2) Hygiene is in your hands 
We’ve just come back from a holiday in Devon.  We borrowed a little cottage there from a friend and in the instructions she put details of the recycling regime: South Hams District Council provides both a kitchen caddy and a brown wheelie bin for the caddy to be emptied into when full.  It provides biodegradable liner bags for the caddy so that it is easy to keep clean and easy to transport the waste from one to the other.
Waste and the creatures that aid its breakdown go hand in hand.
The trick is to be hygienic, but not obsessive. 
If you are the sort of person that has completely cut themselves off from the big wide world out there, who doesn’t like to get muddy, or wear wellies, or who uses all those antibacterial products for everything (you know, not just the soap or the surface cleaner but those plastic chopping boards that are impregnated with an antibacterial bug killer), or who uses a Glade plug-in in case of unexpected elephants dropping in for a cup of tea (I might be getting a bit confused by the advertising there)… then you may well read the Daily Mail and be opposed to recycling food waste because of the mess.
By the way, old ready meals decaying smell considerably worse than e.g. vegetable peelings.  Or may be not if you’ve got so used to them that the smell of raw veg is really off-putting to you.
The whole fortnightly bins collection debacle is clearly colouring the debate here. 
There is no requirement in European law that bins should be collected fortnightly no matter what you might have read to that effect.  However, there is an obligation to increase levels of recycling and cut the amount of waste going to landfill. 
It is possible that in order to do that, and to cut the cost of running recycling house-to-house collections in addition to normal domestic waste collections, some councils decided to do each every other week.  That’s just not sensible – keeping the sort of waste that can’t be recycled hanging around for a fortnight is going to cause exactly the sort of bugs and smells that people complain about.   Complain to the council, heck, vote’em out if they impose that sort of policy.  But don’t write off recycling because of a stupid bureaucratic decision on bin collection….                                         

3) The world does not have infinite resources
The thing is, for me, I can’t understand why this kitchen scrap recycling is thought to be a bad thing. 
How have we got ourselves into a position of thinking that what we do is without consequence? 
If we say “why should I recycle?” what we are in effect saying is “why shouldn’t I be able to use the planet’s resources with no thought for future generations?”  
I’m no saint on this. 
I own far too many clothes. And books.  And things in general. 
I use a car (I use public transport where possible altohugh admittedly this is mainly because I hate driving in London).
I feel really bad about having used disposable nappies rather than “real” ones (buckets of napisan+ living in small first floor flat and going back to work = just not going to happen) but at least I understand that this was a decision to make.
I’m just watching Economy Gastronomy on BBC2, reintroducing families to the concept of cooking for yourself rather than buying ready meals and using up leftovers.  My husband and I are both good cooks, but are terribly time-poor which means we do have a rather better knowledge of the ready meals available out there than we ought to.  But when we cook proper food we overcater and save and freeze portions of bolognese, or fish in a sauce or whatever it might be to turn into other meals later on.  If we cook too much, there’s almost always enough for my son to try it in a toddler friendly version the next day.  Why would I bung my hard effort in the bin when we can eat it up?

There’s a lot of people out there who don’t seem to care, who think that only the latest, most fashionable thing is worthwhile.  As if a house furnished entirely in IKEA is better than one with revamped, personalised older furniture – that old is somehow less asthetically pleasing. 
We’re going to have to stop this, we really are. 
There’s not enough raw materials in the world for us to treat clothes and furniture as if they are disposable. 

4) The Cbeebies factor
I feel the Daily Mail needs to get with the programme.  Literally. 
If you want an idea of what our kids are likely to think about this, take a look at the CBeebies channel.  Barely a programme goes by without a character doing some recycling, planting something in a window box, making a rain catcher, running around outside, cooking something from scratch…
Basically my toddler and thousands of others around the UK are being indoctrinated. And I thoroughly approve.  If recycling can be normal for them, then they can respond to things like the Daily Mail’s article with the outrage it deserves.

5) The State we’re in…
But, you might ask, why does the state need to get involved? 
Why should there be prescribed buckets and a system of fines? 
Surely people are entitled to have a compost heap, or not, but shouldn’t be forced to keep disgusting waste in their otherwise immaculate, antibacterialised, gleaming kitchens rather than hide it in the Brabantia and have someone take it away without having to think about to where?
Well, the liberal part of me thinks so.
I’ve lived in Belgium where you not only get fined for putting the wrong sort of waste in the wrong bin bag, to add insult to injury you have to by all of the different coloured bin bags yourself, no subsidy.  Belgium is very much a police state (albeit one that is big on bureaucracy more than efficiency) with e.g. complusory carrying of ID cards etc. so the idea of a fines system and more stick than carrot seemed quite normal to me there. It works, but it works because everyone does it.
But people need to understand that their actions are the result of choices, that the information is out there for them to use to make those choices, and that they owe it to themselves and the wider world to make informed decisions.  That takes time, effort and a not-so-self-centred view of the world. 
Sometimes the cheaper, quicker fix is just to do as the Belgians do.

I saw a poll earlier this week (here and here) that shows that the UK is a nation of climate change sceptics. 
We’re happy to do the little things, but not put our lives on hold.
And that’s the thing. 
We can be nudged, but try to lecture us, or fine us, and you risk the sort of ludicrous reaction that the Daily Mail has had to something as sensible as recycling food waste.
Oh, and if you still can, vote “yes” in the poll on the Daily Mail’s site in favour of having a kitchen caddy. The link’s up at the top of this page.  The Twitter @polljack campaign has got the “yes” vote to 77% so far but more always a good thing…