I got back from the UK last Tuesday. My apologies to those I did not contact. I could have done with a break – but alas, family affairs were too overwhelming!
The first part of my trip over was magical. I had sufficient air-miles to travel business class the seven hours from Brisbane to Singapore. I thought that would prepare me for part two of the journey – thirteen hours from Singapore to Heathrow.
Alas! One child threw a temper tantrum. My seven hours stood me in good stead – and it was three hours before I finally complained.
I could willingly have strangled the woman sitting next to me, who was only moderately less stressed than I was. She merely smiled when the hostie said “well you know children….”
I was moved – but to a far less comfortable seat.
I felt somewhat vindicated in the baggage retrieval at Heathrow when I heard the same monster still screaming and shouting… 🙂
My trip back proved my point. 13 hours of silence was just great. No children!Â
Boadicea's Chariot 
The older I get the less tolerant I get and so I find myself fast to complain if anything make me feel uncomfortable. At least with noise I can take out my hearing aids! Glad you had a good trip.
Yes, ones tolerance for screaming brats goes down as one get older, that’s for sure!
I take great care to make quite sure that I never spend any time at any event that is likely to be shared by progeny, back in the day a good wallop sorted most of it, not these days with their namby pamby child rearing.
Get this! Our local library is having a baby shower for all incipient mums where they were giving away free books. Some mental defective librarian asked me to come. (At my age?)
Needless to say refused and firmly said I don’t ‘do’ children.
She didn’t take the hint and started wittering on about I must have neighbours.
Waspishly I pointed out that I took great care not to live in the type of location where I might be beset by neighbour’s children.
She still didn’t get the hint. So I let her have it.
Pointed out I didn’t speak Spanish and that they would have been better to disseminate books on contraception and advise their freeloading customers that they shouldn’t breed what they can’t feed or afford to educate.
Went down like a ton of bricks, absolutely splendid. I’s surprised I haven’t had the race crime police round!
Must explain that we have a lot of illegal and legal agricultural labour round here, Mexican, who latch onto anything free they can get, clinics, food banks library, schools even when they are earning reasonable wages, they have too big families and see whitey as prime material for extracting as many freebies as possible.
All their children are excessively noisy and ill mannered.
Glad to hear you made it back in one piece. Long distance travel is so grueling, Vancouver is bad enough at 9.5 hours. Australia double plus, God know how you make it, I couldn’t!
G’day.Boadicea. What is it with some begetters of house apes that they consider themselves ‘special’ and have the right to queue-jump and then foist their bawling, puking, incontinent offspring on the rest of humanity? IMO, all public transport and places should have a segregated sprog section, preferably soundproofed, just like there used to be separate areas for smokers.
And another thing. These ‘baby on board’ placards one sees in the back of cars invariably with one occupant, which says a lot. Their implication is clearly that the occupant is a procreator blessed by God to whom all lesser mortals must defer. Look, in forty years of driving I’ve never had so much as a parking ticket apart from the day instinct overcame common sense and I wrote off a Series Land Rover (which takes some doing) swerving into a bridge support to avoid a spawn of Satan who ran into the road with one of those snorkel parkas over his head. The SOB who bred this creature turned out to be a sergeant at the local piggery and his attitude was, and I quote, ‘If you want to write off your car saving my son’s life, then that’s your problem and if you contact me again I’ll have you done for harassment’: With hindsight I should have run the little fekker down, adding him to Darwin’s gene pool and saved myself several thousand pounds and hundreds of hours of work rebuilding my favoured form of transport.
Bloody hell. I’ve only been back five minutes and my fur is frizzy already! 😀
OZ
PG – I, too find the older I get the less tolerant I become! I find it offensive that the only solution the air-line staff offer is to give me ear-plugs! Since it isn’t me that’s the probelm, I see know reason why I should stuff my ears with silencers!
Christina. My neighbours have two small children. They are delightful. The only noise they make ever make is joyful – and, therefore no problem at all. They bounce up and down on their trampoline, run around the garden and the only noise they ever make is laughter. That I can cope with quite happily. It’s the screaming brats that I loathe…
Oz. I believe a couple of air-lines have instituted child-free zones on their flights. An Ozzie journalist recently criticised their actions – declaring that it was like treating children as if they were animals in a zoo. The article was on line – and every one of the 300+ responses that I skimmed said that if parents brought their children up to behave like animals then separating them from the rest of the passengers was a ‘Good Idea’ – and that included a fair number of parents who travelled with their children 🙂
Tee hee One of my better moments was when I was on the train from London to Liverpool with 40 kg of impeccably-mannered, pedigree German Shepherd Dog snoozing under the table whilst two screaming brats were running riot up and down the aisle. “Excuse me”, i eventually said to their insouciant mother, “You see this Alsatian here under the table?” “Yeah, so what?” “Well,, he’s better trained and better behaved than your two little angels. Better bred too, I don’t doubt”,
Collapse of insouciance and a round of applause from surrounding passengers.
OZ
Love it Oz, kind of thing I would have said too!
Oz! Brilliant!
I once told a parent who got the hump because her 10 year old son’s chair was the only one in the class with a name on that it was because he still wet himself and the other children objected to sitting on his seat – and I saw no reason to inconvenience everyone in a very small class-room with having to move chairs around so that everyone sat on a specific seat.
I could see that there was going to be further discussion – so I said that since one could train a dog to be clean in a few weeks, I really thought that a child could be trained in ten years…
The child returned to school after the summer break of six weeks fully clean…
I wouldn’t get away with such comments these days – more’s the pity!