Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

Why I was not as shocked as the rest of you

I was walking up King Street in South Shields last Saturday morning when I was confronted with a line of four prams abreast all with pushers talking on their mobile phones whilst attempting to have a conversation with each other, they all had Paris Hilton hairstyles and fatty bare deposits hanging over the waistbands of their “tracky bottoms”, I could see eight beer barrel sized hoops hanging from multi pierced ear lobes, and eight pristine white trainers at £90 per pair. The buggies were exclusively MacLaren and the owners can not have been aged any more than seventeen at the most.

No signs of any boys, men, fathers, or whoever was responsible for the joint production of the babies, however had they been their I can almost guarantee that they would have been dressed similarly (minus the ear hoops) but with baseball caps hiding their half shaven heads, fags hanging from the corner of the mouth, and a can of Carlsberg in the mit.

In some areas it’s a common sight, no longer shocks, and is certainly accepted by many of those who live around them on council estates where the house comes with no charges attached, rent paid, council tax paid, assistance with fuel bills, and no experience of ever having a job or intention of finding one. Straight from school (with Darren’s baby) a few months at home with mother and then decamped to a council home all of Chelsea’s own. Sorted, mint, spot on, innit?

Kids with kids, you see them all of the time.

So I wasn’t shocked when I read about Alfie, neither was I surprised to find that the girl who looked old enough to be his mother was named Chantelle, however like Carol Midgely I was a little surprised that the parents of these two young children were so quick to go running to The Sun to spill the beans – perhaps money was involved (and they looked delighted on the TV) who knows? Makes you wonder why they didn’t sign an “exclusive” deal with Hello magazine for £1m and give young Maisie the best possible start in life and pay for Alfie’s Xbox 360, after all the poor kids have been raised to the dubious level of “celebs” now, there life will be blighted by the press for the next eighteen years as they try to find out (a) did they stay together as a family, and (b) did Alfie become a grandfather by the age of thirty?

Alfie, of course is not alone, in recent years four boys aged eleven have fathered children in the UK (what the hell is happening to hormones these days, when I was eleven girls were sissies and boys climbed walls and played football). We still have the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in the EU with 385 girls under the age of 14 becoming pregnant between 1998 and 2007.

Edukashun, Edukashun, Edukashun, trumpeted NuLabour when they came to the throne in 1997, so what exactly has it taught our kids ?

Alfie and Chantelle have lost something very valuable and precious, possibly more precious than their education (which will undoubtedly suffer, but they can catch up at college in later years) what they have lost can never be regained or recaptured, they have lost their childhood. Childhood gives you a set of learning experiences and risk assessments that you carry for the rest of your natural, it’s an important balancing mechanism in your overall development, without it you may have problems in later life. For Alfie and Chantelle’s sake we have to hope that the sudden elevation to maturity does not cause too massive a disruption to their own mental development.

Update

Sunday 15 Feb. 2009

This story unravels and gets even worse as they scrap with newspaper owners over grubby money.

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