Caption: Throwing out time at the museum
So I’m standing outside the V&A just now on a rain swept street. There’s a carousel. Some Christmasishly lit trees, a singer on the corner doing carols, blah blah, all that. Very festive. Also a bunch of extremely middle class parents, exiting one of the museums to my right. But then something happened. You know that noise that an older baby makes when they discover two things at virtually the same time, firstly the joy of holding a balloon and, secondly that balloons fly away and never come back once you’ve let go? I mean Never ever.
And for fully a minute, as I stuff my files into my bag, the poor kid is just having this spasm of what is, for her, clearly absolute bloody grief over the flyaway balloon.
The crying gets worse instead of better as it becomes clearer and clearer to the obviously quite intelligent infant that the balloon is in fact getting farther away and not nearer, and as her suspicion increases that it’s really almost definitely not actually going to come back at all. That it is increasingly an ex balloon.
So whilst, yes, this is strictly in the realm of middle class problems the kid is having right now, nevertheless I think we can agree that her feelings in the moment are all very understandable, right? Normal even.
But then, here’s the thing. The parents, the friends, the aunts and uncles, the whoever, were doing that weird and I think uniquely British thing of laughing at the child’s suffering. In that ho ho ho faux-jolly ‘yes, look isn’t it wonderful. Let’s all wave goodbye to the sodding ex balloon. And Look how we are learning things, darling, as it drifts on the breeze. We are learning Science, and the ephemerality of balloons, and something something about the acceptance of loss, and all this is just so jolly good for us, kiddo, purifying even and then in a minute they skip right to ‘Stop crying, Silly. Have a bun.’
And, who knows, maybe they’re right to approach it that way, I mean what do I know?
But then the kid just caught my eye. She stopped crying for a split second. And for just a moment I thought I could see, looking deeply into those big wet eyes, that the infant had indeed learned an very important lesson today and via the balloon.
Which is that adults totally suck and it’s only gonna get worse.
I feel like this may all have something to do with Brexit but I’m not too sure.
