Baby Talk

As I got rather serious last time I posted here, and bearing in mind that it is a Bank Holiday, I thought that I'd keep the subject matter a bit lighter today.  So let's talk about babies - everyone loves them, don't they?   The British media seem to think so - especially when they are Royal babies.  The weekend saw us bombarded with pictures of one of them, (it's no good asking me which one, I'm simply not interested enough to care), which surprised me somewhat.  For one thing, I'm surprised that the media think that anyone is still interested.  I'd really hoped that the days when everyone fawned over cute pictures of Royals, even baby ones, were long over.  But the press clearly think differently.  I'm also surprised that they ran so many pictures of this infant because, well, they all look alike, don't they?  I mean, that could be any baby in the pictures, couldn't it?   I know that there are people out there right now saying that I'm wrong on this point, but they're probably the parents of young babies and consequently know their child intimately and could always pick them out from a crowd of infants.  But trust me, for those of us happily childless and not too keen on babies anyway, they all look the same.

Curiously though, despite not being at all keen on babies, I found my paternal instincts stirring the other day whilst watching an old film.  The film in question was Ken Loach's Poor Cow and I found myself increasingly irritated whilst watching it, by the main character's frequent neglect of her baby.  OK, I know that she was a single mother as a result of her violent husband going down for robbery and I know that she was living in poverty, but, at risk of sounding like a Daily Mail reader, that's no excuse.  It really shouldn't have taken nearly losing the kid when she left him to play with other local kids (he was a toddler by then, around eighteen months old) who took him off to a local demolition site, to make her realise how important he was to her.  I know it was only a film, but for some reason this aspect of the plot really riled me.  Something about it clearly touched my parental instincts which, regardless of whether we are parents or not, or whether we desire to have children or not, are innate in all of us and seem to activated by the must unexpected of sources.  I should add that pictures of babies, even Royal ones don't activate them.   That said, actual babies, even though I don't really like them, (I'm far happier with children when they're older), do tend to activate my protective instincts, (in truth, my uneasiness around babies might well be down to the fact that they seem so fragile to me and I'm subconsciously afraid that I might inadvertently injure them, so my protective instincts make me recoil from holding them).  So there you go, a bit of self analysis for a Bank Holiday Monday - much lighter than the anti-semitism allegations from last time!