3am thinking

 I’m not alone. Billions of women are awake at 3am - thinking. These are not useful thoughts. They are pointless considerations. Sleep is the time when your brain goes into filing clerk mode but at my age the filing cabinet is a bashed-up, green, metal affair, with sticky drawers and some sections so full there is no room to cram another piece of information.

This is when your brain wakes you up.

“Excuse me,” it says, feigning a politeness that quivers on the edge of irritation, “but where, the fuck, am I meant to put this?”

Bleary-eyed you consider the problem. Not least the one of your brain swearing at you in the middle of the night. 

“Well,” you tell it, “Maybe you could not put it anywhere. Just leave it. We all know it’s not important.”

Brain huffs. Brain thinks everything is important. You never know when you might need this again is its motto. Sometimes Brain wonders if it should turn the motto into Latin to give itself more gravitas, so that you take its 3am problems more seriously. Brain then wonders why it doesn’t know Latin. It swears at you again for not learning it when you were younger, before it begun to resemble Swiss cheese. 

After a merry-go-round of insults Brain finally comes back to the original problem and tells you, once again, that it is important and that you are getting no more sleep until you’ve decided where to put it. You get up. Brain is determined. 

After an hour, you and Brain are no further along. 

“Why don’t you blog?” Brain likes a blog, it sees it as an extension to the filing cabinet; a Big Yellow Box Company storage solution. You tell Brain that people will know that you have really lost the plot when they hear the problem. You remind Brain that not everything is important but Brain only swears at you in Latin and wonders where it learnt ‘filis canis’ before looping round the question of whether there are any better Latin insults than ‘son of a dog.’

The problem that Brain is struggling with is where to put something it overheard in the swimming pool. Really, it’s nothing. It is not the answer to the destruction of all humanity and although it’s a little odd and quite funny it really isn’t important.

The thing it heard?

A lad, probably in his early 20s, jumped in the pool and shouted, “Fuck me, that’s wet.”

Thank you Brain.

Psycho Pete

 Well played Robinsons Squash. Your advertisers are amazing. Everyone is talking about your drink. Parents are rushing out to fill their children with citric acid,  aspartame, saccharine, potassium sorbate, sodium metabisulphate, cellulose gum,  sucrose acetate isobuterate,  glycerol esters of wood resins and carotene colouring, so they can have a laugh around the kitchen table after a difficult day. Teachers are spitting feathers. At the end of a very long underfunded year, where behaviour is challenging (a teacher euphemism) and parental support is patchy this advert has jangled a few frayed nerves. 

If you want a product to be talked about there is nothing better than exploiting a division that already exists, especially if you can set two large vociferous groups against each other. The arguments will run and run.

You might expect me to be part of the loud teacher group, as my children are grown. I could add my voice to those calling for the advert to be banned, point out that a call home isn’t something to be laughed at. 

However, the advert did make me laugh.

I’m good at filling in the back story.

We all know that child. He’s Psycho Pete. He has squash in his water bottle and no matter how often you point out that a water bottle should only contain water he spills the  sweet sticky liquid on someone else’s work on a daily basis. You suspect it’s not quite the accident he claims but Pete is in it for the shits and giggles. 

The advert shows Psycho Pete’s mum at work when a call from school flashes up on her mobile screen. “He’s done what?” she asks. She is cross but unsurprised. She picks PP up and tells the teacher not to worry, that she would be having serious words with him. They go to the car in silence, she is fuming. They get out of the car, still fuming and silent. They sit at the kitchen table and she gets squash from the cupboard, pours them both a drink and they start to laugh. 

We don’t know if there was a conversation in the car and I’m assuming that the advertisers think that is where she told him off and, maybe found out it was a minor misdemeanour that was quite funny. Yes, even PP does things that are funny, although they do not end in a call home. 

In my head, though, the conversation went something like this.

PPM: I’m so embarrassed. I had to leave work again early. 

PP: It wasn’t my fault.

PPM: O-kaaay

PP: No. Matthew smells.

PPM: Right….

PP: I think he eats poo.

PPM: I’m sure…

PP: He leant over me and his breath. Poo. Stinky. Wow! And it wasn’t my fault. The scissors were in my hand.

PPM: But in his eye? Really Peety?

PM: He looked so funny. Running around, with the scissors sticking out, shouting, “Oh my eye!”

PPM: Your teacher is really cross. It’s embarrassing for me to keep getting calls. Why do you do this to me?

Obviously, that’s all the time there is for conversation because they don’t live far enough away from school to really justify using a car.

My admiration for the advertisers who have got people talking their client’s product is huge but I do wonder if it’s also a cautionary tale. Does squash turn children into feral beasts?