Undeveloped beings...

This week we reached that time on the New Planet when undeveloped beings are released from their shackles for a while, and allowed to run amok...I mean free...in the malls, shops, High streets and parks. Yes, half-term!

Now, it's not that I don't like undeveloped beings, I do, especially those to whom I am related. It's just that there are others who seem to have little or no respect for those of us that are well developed and grumpy and who like their peace and quiet and don't appreciate having chips and beans flung at them while trying to have a gentile cuppa in a coffee shop. And even more annoying, is the parents of said delinquents who sit there with a silly grin thinking that their darling pouring the tomato sauce onto the table and drawing pictures in it with a snotty finger, is awfully cute, innit?

The thing is, there are happily, a number of little darlings who smile politely and respond to my feeble middle-aged jokes without taking offence and trying to impale me on the end of their i-pod, and I don't mind them. In fact, I've even been known to strike up a conversation of sorts with one or two while in the pool, which segues nicely into my next point. Why, I ask myself, do they, the others, have to leap and splash and smack me on the head with their pool noodle (known on the New Planet as a woggle) and get in the way of my 'serious attempts to get fit' while their mother sits in the hot tub oblivious to the watery mayhem ensuing around her? And before you go thinking I'm just horribly unreasonable, I'm not the only flabby one that has finally taken themselves back to the changing room/sauna/steam room in a huff to wait until the undeveloped ones have run out of puff and departed, often wailing loudly because they 'don't wanna go home', leaving our pool in the serene splendour that we (the well developed beings that go every day and not only during the holidays) enjoy and expect.

Of course, having once been a pedagogue, I do understand a bit about undeveloped beings and I know that's what they do, leap about with unbridled passion and enthusiasm for life, and no doubt I did the same, although that time is now shrouded in the mists of time and I can barely remember it...or my own name half the time. It's simply that I object to them being unsupervised and unruly and often downright rude. Or am I just getting old?

Ah, but it's only for a brief period and next week they'll all go back to torture their pedagogues once more, the streets will be quiet, no more will I be in danger of being run over by an out of control skate-board or have the back of my heels irreparably damaged by a supermarket trolley being driven by a Louis Hamilton wannabe. Until the next half-term or looonnnngggg Summer holiday....at which time I shall remain cloistered indoors or take myself off to some exotic place where undeveloped beings are banned.