6413/19333
RIP to the tenacious and amazing and literally historic Dame Vera Lynn. I thought I’d met her once, but turns out I had concertinaed two separate meetings into one. Warming Up recalls stuff better than my failing brain. But what if someone has hacked me and rewritten my past? Good question.
The first time in 2008, I introduced her as “The Original Spice Girl” which she was very chuffed about, even though I’d say that downplayed her status quite significantly.
The second time in 2010 I introduced her to my dad, a huge risk for everyone involved, but somehow we got away with it.
She did a lot of work for Scope, alongside all the other stuff that she is famous for and outlived the vast majority of the soldiers she entertained in the war. I guess she has found out whether she gets to meet them again.
It was my turn to look after the kids today, which was a tremendous struggle as I’d had yet another shitty and paranoid night’s sleep. I did OK, but thank God for iPads is all I can say. How did our parents manage without them? And how did their parents manage without TV. I watched loads of TV even though my parents worried it was rotting my brain (they may have been proven right), but now weirdly, we worry about giving the kids too much iPad time and TV is a preferable thing to be doing. Is it just because it’s old. Was TV really inferior to books back in the day or had books just been around longer? When books came out did parents think they’d rot their kids brains and say they should spend their time staring at nothing and imagining stuff.
I reckon I learned more from TV than books. I am sure that my daughter has. And as much as we’re meant to be concerned about screen time (and sure, it can’t be constant, though tell that to me) I think the iPads do more to expand the kids’ minds than anything else. It’s just the danger of how they might get expanded if they chance across the wrong thing on YouTube. Or worse.
I managed to do some stuff that didn’t involved screens (we had some great fun with our own shadows, just like the people in olden times must have done by the light of a candle), but was glad that I could get 30 minutes of relative ease by handing them the iPads. They’d be on them all day if they could be. But I can’t really criticise them. Lock-down has made me more addicted to my phone than ever. I am surprised the weekly report on my screen time doesn’t get delivered sarcastically or cause all my devices to explode in a firework display of sparks.
My daughter’s favourite game at the moment is Pacman, which makes me very happy, because that was one of my favourites back in the day and I presume this would be the same as me telling my dad that I loved “Swallows and Amazons” (which unbelievable is not a porn film). I didn’t like Swallows and Amazons. I am sure I treated my dad with the same disdain that my daughter now treats me. It’s all payback. Life is just about payback.
