Just make them go away (Room 101)

Name: historywitch

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Product:	Room 101
Date:	12.05.07 (254 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: much nicer Historywitch, nicer world, world peace and happiness

Disadvantages: why on earth do they exist in the first place?

Ahhh, at last. A chance to release all those little pent-up rants that I have been storing inside, only inflicting them on my long suffering family! Whilst these aren’t my worst nightmares (I wonder what George Orwell would have thought of them), they are things which have the capacity to make me see red, irritate me immensely and sometimes render me speechless (maybe you shouldn’t put them in there just for that reason!).


The concept of ‘children’s food’

I get so cross with restaurants and big companies assuming that it is acceptable to serve up poor quality food in bright packaging for children. Whenever we go out to eat in the UK the children’s menu is almost always along the ‘chips, sausages, fish fingers, beans’ line, with fizzy drinks or those fruit shoot monstrosities to accompany. Whenever I ask for a smaller portion of whatever we are having for my daughter, I am greeted with incredulity, why would I want to feed my child ‘adult food’. If I’m having a delicious piece of fresh breaded cod, with potato wedges and salad, why is my daughter being fobbed off with fishfingers and chips? It’s the same in supermarkets, the children’s food is easily identifiable by its bright packaging, prominent positioning and its long list of added ingredients on the back. My child is growing and developing, she shouldn’t be (and isn’t) pumped full of MRM (mechanically reclaimed meat), hydrogenated vegetable fats, artificial flavourings and sweeteners, all of which have links to health and behavioural problems…not to mention being untested and unnecessary. In an ideal world there would be no need for separate children’s menus in any restaurants, you could just choose a half size version of whatever is on the menu. There would also be no need for me to scrutinise the back of packaged food from the supermarket before buying it and I wouldn’t have to battle with my daughter to choose the healthier and non-Disneyfied version of products.


Irresponsible dog owners

This one really makes me see red. If you have a dog and it poos in a public place …PICK IT UP. I don’t want to step in it, I don’t want my daughter to step in it and I don’t want to accidentally bring it into my house!! I don’t want to have to check my shoes or buggy wheels and I certainly don’t want to have to check the grass when I want to sit down. Not only is it full of nasty diseases and just generally unpleasant, it can often be pretty hard to avoid when out and about. It is completely irresponsible to ignore your dog’s fouling when it is simple to pick it up and put it in a bin, especially if you are in an area where children like to play. I would like to thank responsible dog owners who do pick up after their pet, unfortunately they have been let down by those who are stupid and antisocial. If you don’t want to have to pick up poo, don’t get a dog!!

Gender division of chores.

My husband is perfectly capable of working our washing machine, ironing his own shirts, washing up dishes, changing our daughter’s nappies and hanging out washing. I am perfectly capable of using power tools, hammering and screwing in nails/screws, putting together flat pack furniture and changing a plug. If you can use a computer you can work a washing machine, if you can handle an iron you can handle a hammer. My daughter, who is not quite two years old can sort and hang washing for me, and can load, set and start the washing machine. She also has a little toy tool set, just like mummy. There is no reason for grown adults to say ‘oh, I don’t know how to do that, better wait until my husband/wife gets home’ or to say to me (having done whatever the thing is) ‘oh I never would have known how to do that’. Neither did I at first, but I learnt; I made mistakes of course…the first time I wired up the toaster plug, all the lights in the flat went out-but I never made that mistake again and now I know how the fuse box works too. There is no reason why certain household jobs should always be done by one member of the family and no reason why you cant get your children involved early as well!

Celebs

Whenever I walk past a magazine rack in a shop I am assailed by invitations to find out what ‘so-and-so’ is doing, has slept with, how they lost 90% of their body weight, their shocking revelations and their new hairstyles. I have no idea who any of them are and would be hard pushed to put a name to even one of the faces (mostly because of the plastic surgery!). When I have asked what they are famous for it is for sleeping with another celeb and/or having got body parts out on a TV show I haven’t watched and/or for some similarly pointless event. It seems there is a whole money spinning industry based around these worthless people, who seem to me to be a whole morass of inappropriate behaviour, attitudes and lifestyles. I certainly wouldn’t want my daughter to be one of these people or even <shudder> to consider one of them a role model. Why do we as a nation feel the need to talk about and encourage these pointless people? Why do we waste so many trees on glossy colourful magazines to cover their latest unsavoury
exploits?


Text speak

OK OK, I admit…I cant read it, I cant write in it and it gives me a very big headache trying to extricate the meaning from the lines of letters and numbers, so this is pure selfishness. I can just about put up with it in a short text message (although my texts are always in full….with punctuation), but for longer than a sentence you might as well just ring me because I’ll have to spend 10 minutes trying to translate the damn thing. Even worse is when people choose to write in text speak on forums! In these cases there are no letter constraints, so why do it? I’m certainly not going to waste my time reading and translating it. We all have a vocabulary of many thousands of words, the meanings and sounds of which have evolved over hundreds of years, giving us the means to convey all our emotions, explain delicate and detailed situations and to make ourselves clearly understood so why reduce it to the bare bones? This little rant has probably made me seem very uncool, but I don’t care…I would rather be a pedant than a txter.

Summary: INTO ROOM 101 PLEASE