A government initiative for tackling childhood obesity has run into trouble. This is because of worries that a high-profile anti-obesity advertising campaign could, inadvertently, lead to fat children being teased by their schoolmates. Personally, I find this perturbing. Our Government — which has a lot of hot statistics on this stuff — has reason to believe that modern children have become so insular and unobservant that they won’t tease a fat kid until it’s pointed out to them by the Government. My own experience — which contains well nigh 18 years of childhood — is different. It suggests that kids can spot a bloater from 100 yards — rising to 300 if the kid is hoisted into a tree and left to cry there, pitifully, as I so often and, more pertinently, so fatly, was.
Frankly, an advertising campaign will be neither here nor there. There are, in this life, three things that children are programmed to do by nature: crave sugar, find the phrase “pee-pee poo-poo” funny, and tease fat kids. Teasing fat kids is how you cut your teeth for later life. It’s a rite of passage. Personally, I can think of a much more invidious and widespread cultural hegemony to which no one seems to have paid any attention: friends.
Friends — or rather, the pressure to have about six dozen of them, with a hard core of 12 best friends, four intimates, and one to whom you’re almost psychically conjoined, and perhaps share a magical realm — can be the ruination of a modern child. If an alien were to alight on Earth today and spend a mere hour absorbing children’s culture, he or she would assume that childhood friendships were marginally more important than water and air — rather than, as is the reality, two small people ignoring each other, sporadically squabbling over a toy, and then complaining when the other has 11 more/fewer peas on their plate.
And yet, if you’re a child, the overriding message of every TV show, film, book and magazine is that you might as well lie down in front of a bus if you don’t have friends.
“There’s nothing like the friends you have found/ Through thick and thin your friends will bring/ A love we all can share,” the modish Australian quintet Hi-5 sing, blessed with such intense friendship that they all dress in matching Day-Glo jumpsuits. Nemo in Finding Nemo, Simba in The Lion King, Ariel in The Little Mermaid — no character in a Disney animation can so much as sit on a chair without a cluster of pals singing a song about how it’s so much better to sit on a chair “with friends”. Barbie has had 24 new friends since 2000. Twenty four! Blimey! I don’t think I’ve met that many people in my life. Birthdays alone must bankrupt the doll.
Basically, a character in a film or TV show can lose one or both parents, their house, their status in society or, indeed, their society itself, but it’s never once contemplated that they might lose their friends. This can only compound the anxiety of a child who is, statistically, fairly unlikely to lose both parents, their village and most of Western society, but will almost certainly spend a short spell being Johnny No-Mates of Lonerville. In the modern world, being friendless is seen as more calamitous than losing your father, king of the lions, in a stampede of wildebeest. Yet most friends you have at the age of, say, 11, are just some kids who live near to you who hurt you slightly less than all the other kids at school. There’s rarely anything more emotionally profound than mutual sugar-addiction and Subbuteo going on.
The taboo of childhood friendlessness is a recent development. Even back in the 1980s it was presumed that there would be some kids who just wouldn’t have friends. Nicola, for instance, was quietly left to emit a long, slow, constant stream of green mucus from one nostril while sitting in the corner of the playground and eating Monster Munch without any further comment or harassment from her schoolmates. We knew no one would ever joyously bang their lunchbox down next to Mark in the dinner hall, yet no one ever thought to comment on it. I, too fat to be Wonderwoman in the Wonderwoman games, was quietly abandoned between the ages of 5 and 8 to read an upside-down copy of The Railway Children by the bins. No one ever thought to shout “Rah, no mates” and then put me in the bins. But being alone, and indeed loneliness, were just accepted as a fact of childhood. There were lonely pursuits — kicking a ball against a wall, walking around the playground with the dinner ladies, eating 12 Curly Wurlys before lunch, and becoming as big as a barn — and lonely heroes like Olga Korbut, J. R. Ewing and Horace from Horace Goes Skiing.
These days, however, fictional representations of children never portray them with fewer than a 25-strong crew back-up. This fosters a latent friend-inadequacy that haunts even the very young.
“I only have 28 people invited to my party!” my daughter wailed on her fifth birthday.
My fifth birthday consisted of me and my sister staring at each other over a plate of Jamboree biscuits, denuded of their marshmallow pom-poms before breakfast. And you know what? We were glad to be proud loners. Because if we’d had friends, they would have wanted to cut in on the chow.
Deathless lyrics are often buried
I note that MTV is trying to name the greatest lyric of all time by opening up the issue to a vote by its slack-jawed, politically apathetic, gnat’s-attention-span viewers. At the moment, the Arctic Monkeys’ I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor has narrowly taken the lead, over T-Rex’s 1972 glam-rock hit Children of the Revolution. One suspects that this is mainly because the Arctic Monkeys were in the charts only a month ago, and the T-Rex song was used in a recent advertising campaign for mobile phones. Things win “best of” polls only if they’re either a) recent or b) have been used in an advertisement.
The problem with trying to decide the best lyric of all, however, is that often they aren’t in classic songs at all. There’s a legion of otherwise middle-ranking country & western songs that have deathless lyrics: “If the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.” “You’re the reason our kids are ugly/ But at least you scare the burglars away.” “How can I miss you/ if you won’t go away?”
My favourite is by the Latina temptress Shakira. “I love you for free/ I’m not your mother” she sang in Objection — a song that displays an admirably economical grasp of how best to pull in a village.
