leave a kilner jar in a shed with its lid slightly open and if you're lucky you'll find an interesting bug in it who couldn't get out again and died an agonising death of starvation and thirst. If you're REALLY lucky, you'll get three bugs with way too many legs plus a baby one which is a bit purple. What the hell ARE they? Living in Portugal is good. As well the finding bugs in jars thing, there are QUITE a few other lovely things. I was standing with a fellow Briton and a Pt last night as we watched our respective smallish kids running around the place at midnight, having a great time as we growed-ups did the growed-up thing of chatting, gossiping, telling stories, taking the piss and giggling a lot (well, actually guffawing. I don't giggle). It occurred to one of we Britons that if we were in Britain on this balmy night at a similar get-together, we wouldn't be standing there at such an hour having such growed-up fun. Being parents of young children, we would have had to have gone home hours ago to put them to bed, or minutes ago to go and relieve the fifteen year old drug addict of her babysitting duties. Our Pt friend looked at us, mystified. Why on earth wouldn't you take your children? Here the kids come too. And they're used to it, used to not being stuck in bed at seven at night, so they don't go all mad and hyper and sugar crazed because they've stayed up late. In Britain, you can't take your kids anywhere, let alone at night time, unless it's a disgusting Harvester (and not late at night or you'll get funny looks), a Little Chef (ditto and ditto on the disgusting) or if you're lucky enough to live in West or North London some fucking expensive "mother and child" restaurant (which probably closes at 4.30pm) where you probably end up wanting to commit hari kari with the plastic cutlery (I'm imagining, as I've never had the misfortune to go to one, but I've heard they exist). I could go on and on and on about how dreadful it is doing anything with children in England as compared to Portugal, but I won't because you'll cry and I'll get angry (angry with how silly it is, not with your crying) at how silly it is, silly that you STILL have to apologise for taking kids to restaurants (and shops/zoos/museums/friend's houses/to see the queen/etc.)... and don't think of taking them to any of the London museums and giving them FOOD in the in house restaurants/cafés. The WONDERFUL Museum of Childhood is ruined for me by the fact that they tried to sell me A sausage stuck ironically in a ball of mashed potato for six quid last summer which wasn't enough to feed a two-year-old, let alone a hungry five-year-old whose parents, if they had tried to sate the children AND themselves in such a place, would be heading for bankruptcy, and trying to find lunch in Bethnal Green that isn't a bottle of Lucozade (mmmm) and a mars bar (mmm) OR halal and QUITE hot, not forgetting, of course, that you can't take kids into pubs either, is QUITE hard. But hey, that's food. And we were talking bed times. When I go to stay with my family, it's VERY strange to them all that my kids aren't in bed by English (or Ingerlish, I suppose... a girl likes to be consistent) o'clock... they don't go to bed at that time at home, and they sure aren't going to suddenly decide to go to bed early while they're on holiday. It's very awkward. Children just aren't up late at night, it's not the done thing. Here, if I put my kids to bed at Ingerlish o'clock, people would think I was really odd and QUITE mean. Last year, when the child went missing in the Algarve, and it was reported that the she and her siblings were in bed at seven, people here thought that was REALLY weird. No, I mean REALLY. And it probably didn't help matters much. LET THE LITTLE SODS STAY UP LATE! IT'S GOOD FOR THEM! AND IT'S FUN! THEN THERE'S THE ADDED BONUS THAT THEY WON'T JUMP ON YOU AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. Obvious really. OOh, that was only supposed to be a few words long, and I appear now to have gone off on one..... and now it's 1.15am, none of us went to bed until QUITE late last night (I shan't say how late, or the Ingerlish Social Services will be after me) so I'd better shut the heck up and go to bed. Goodnight.
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