High school return post-lockdown and kids – and parents’ – fears:
ME: I can totally relate to the fears that kids have right now. I spent an entire year – when I was about 10 – worrying whether I’d spontaneously combust. It’s frightening, How anxious you can become. So fast.
HUSBAND: Was that the same year you would only leap from furniture to furniture because you read about house dust mites lurking in carpets – in the Daily Mail?
ME: Yeah. But that thing lasted only for the summer of ’83.
HUSBAND: It was stupid though, to worry about human spontaneous combustion. Your parents didn’t even smoke.
ME: They did until I was tiny. My mum met some of her best friends on the doorstep of Ashton hospital. Just after they’d all given birth. All having a fag.
HUSBAND: Different world. My mum was sending me to buy a 20 pack of Lambert n Butler when I was 8 years old.
ME: Blimey. Our kids are 15and 12. And we can’t even trust them to find the grey wheelie bin in the garden.
HUSBAND: Actually, I think one of them is scared of the wheelie bin.
ME: That’ll be because you told them that vampires live in bins.
HUSBAND: It wasn’t me who started it! It was Sesame Street!
ME: Well, you’re wrong there. Count von Count the vampire did NOT live in a bin. It was Oscar. Oscar the Grouch.
HUSBAND: How on earth can you remember that?
ME: Because I’m a woman. And it’s also their excuse for not putting the rubbish into the bin when I give it to them to take out.
HUSBAND: What do you mean?
ME: I always tell them ‘here, take this and go and see Oscar the Grouch’ and they always say, ‘No thanks, I said hello to Dad already once today.”
HUSBAND: Ha ha ha. You’ll spontaneously combust yourself with your wit, if you’re not too careful.