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We were watching the Teletubbies this morning and Phoebe turned to me and said “What kind of animals are the Teletubbies?”
It’s an excellent question, but also one that bridges the gap between innocence and knowledge and was thus quite profound. She knows enough to be curious about the world and yet is still unable to completely identify what is reality and what is imagination. To be fair the vast majority of humans have this problem and in anyone over eight it’s more tragic than charming. But I was charmed and quite moved by the question and had to try and work out how best to answer it. I was also amused that there might be a load of these weird monkey things with TV sets in their stomachs out in the wild, most of whom didn’t have the X factor to get on TV.
I said that they were Teletubbies and that was the kind of animal they were, but also that they only appeared on TV and in toy shops and she was satisfied both by the answer and the fact that she could compartmentalise them as creatures that she’d never actually meet. Well not in the wild. It’s slightly complicated by the fact that she’s been to where they film Cbeebies and met some of the characters from the shows.
For some reason as I sat there looking at her watch the show I was almost crying. She’s becoming a thinking person who can construct complex questions (and thus take the pressure off me from writing them for the podcast) but she’s still coming to grips with what the fucking hell is going on in the world. I guess I remember that confusion about reality and fantasy as well as trying to understand what real things actually meant. With the ever sneaking knowledge that you’re having things kept from you and that people are fucking with you. But for now you mainly trust whatever they tell you.
So I am glad I gave a factual answer and also impressed by the naive sophistication of the query.
It was the long drive home today and of course the sun was shining and it was going to be a beautiful day. But I was looking forward to getting home. I drove the first half of the six hour drive and then Catie took over. The M25 was pretty busy and she is always quite worried about what lane she needs to be in, but it was pretty hard to move across anyway. At one point she realised she was in the lane to come off at the next slip road, but there was over a quarter of a mile to the exit and she had plenty of time to get across and nothing was moving very fast. So she took a bit of time to make sure there was a gap for her - admirable caution from a mother not wanting to destroy her beautiful children in a needless burst of impatience. Perhaps she took one second more than was strictly necessary, but it would make no difference to anyone, but a lorry behind us impatiently blared its horn, presumably because he could have moved into the space we were in and shaved 0.3 of a second from his journey time. He then cruised past us (and there was still a good distance to the junction) and looked at us in his mirror and held his arm out of the window to make a wanker sign at us. I pulled a confused face at him and laughed at his road annoyance. Not only had this infraction impacted on his day, or been deserving of being called a wanker by his hand, I also felt quite strongly that you can not use that particular wanker sign to a female driver. Or at least that if you do it means something else. To a man the wanker sign means, you are a wanker. It’s a pretty lame insult given that it would be unusual for any man not to have masturbated at some point in his life and probably statistically likely that he had done so in the last 24 hours. But at the heart of the gesture is man acknowledgement that you are a sad male, unable to find someone to have intercourse with and thus reduced to pleasuring yourself like a monkey or one of the non-TV Teletubbies from the wild, who haven’t been neutered and express themselves in this way too often for Cbeebies.
But if you do the male wanker sign to a woman, that means something different. It might means, well done, you have found a male to indulge in light to heavy petting with and you enjoy masturbating your partner, probably as one option in a whole panoply fo sexual activity. And I, as a lorry driver who probably has one of those electric vaginas that plug into a cigarette lighter, wish I could find someone like you. The wanker gesture to a woman is actually pointing to yourself and admitting that you are the wanker.
I didn’t have time to think about this too much, because the lorry driver was so intent in letting us know how aggrieved he was that we’d got into lane very slightly too late, (and letting us know about his plug in vagina) that he failed to notice that the car in front of him at the junction was making a properly late lane manoeuvre and trying to get off the start of the slip road and back on to the motorway. He finally saw this car in his path at the last minute and then had to lurch to the left to avoid a collision.
In a way it would been satisfying had his intent to let us know how bad our driving was had caused him to be in a terrible accident due to his own much, much worse driving and the properly dangerous driving of someone else. But also it would probably have meant the reasonably innocent other driver dying in the process. So I contented myself at laughing at the lorry driver and how foolish he’d been made to look, whilst erroneously using a rude hand sign. I didn’t call him a wanker with my own hands though. And I don’t know the hand sign for someone using a plug in vagina, so I just let it go.
