One of the pleasures of Saturday is to sit and work my way through The Guardian while listening to the radio. It’s a good, solid, relaxing start to the weekend (obviously, I don’t read the Sport or Travel sections. I’m not weird).

However, there’s a distressing rise in the number of ‘cutesy kids’ features appearing throughout the paper. These used to be confined to the Family section, which I skim through for the occasional interesting paragraph (and it’s a lot easier now that awful ‘Living With Teenagers’ column has gone. That used to make me spit blood).

But the Magazine was redesigned the other week, and part of that is a page, called ‘Children’, which each week profiles a, um, child. It’s trying to tap into that ‘kids say the funniest things’ philosophy. The trouble is that they’re always the offspring of twattish middle-class parents. I hate The Guardian when it turns the spotlight onto its readers. Suddenly, I feel freakish and excluded. My family are lower middle class; Jeremy Hardy defined this on The News Quiz the other week as ‘knowing how poor people live but wincing if someone holds a knife like a pen’. So, although I evidently listen to Radio 4, my family wouldn’t know, nor be particularly bothered about, where to find it on the dial. I didn’t eat pasta till I was 18, didn’t go abroad until I was 19, I remember mum using Co-Op dividend stamps. We weren’t ‘posh’.

I don’t attach any particular moral value to this, it’s just how it was or is. I’ve kind of become ‘the posh one’ in the family, with my organic veg box, my interest in the Arts, my Nigel Slater recipes. But I’ll never be truly Middle Class – capital M, capital C. I hope.

Today’s featured child is Cy. See, what I mean. Anyway, among his charming aperçus (told you about being posh) is this depressing statement:

In our family our names have all got two letters. Daddy liked them because they’re quite religious, like Io’s the moon and Rx means king. 


Rx. Honestly. I ask you.

 

Rx.

 

 

Rx.

 

Jesus.

But, for sheer teeth-grinding irritation, we have to go back a few weeks to the child that launched this feature. He’s called Noah, he’s 6 years old, and he said:

Picasso’s my favourite artist. He doesn’t draw properly, he’s an impressionist, same as Van Gogh. 

I’m bad at helping myself. I can’t help it if I really want to do something. Like Johnny Cash doesn’t want to take drugs but he can’t help it. I can’t help buying Doctor Who cards or doing swapsies.

I had a girlfriend once and I don’t have one any more. She was a bit annoying – she couldn’t really control her anger.

No, I bet she couldn’t, you irritating shit. Nor, increasingly, can I.

 

Why do they have to spoil my weekend like this?

 

IN SUMMARY: Hanging’s too good for them.