An Australian business owner did a brave thing this week. Jodie Morris announced that her cafe would no longer be accepting badly behaved children. If parents were looking for somewhere for children to “run rampant and annoy other customers,” she wrote on Facebook, then her premises were “not child friendly”.
This has upset some customers, but I imagine others will breathe a sigh of relief. I would have gone further. The “well behaved” rule will no doubt lead to conflict further down the line (“Why does my darling have to leave when that other child can stay?”). So why not ban the whole lot of them? I believe in the sanctity of child-free spaces. Am I the only one; will someone not think of the adults?
I realise that when one makes a statement such as this the defensive parent’s immediate retort will be, “Well, you don’t have children.” It’s true, I don’t. But I was a carer to my autistic brother for 12 years and have therefore wiped more bottoms and endured more Thomas the Tank Engine reruns than you will ever know. Then I was a nanny. I love kids, I just think child-free spaces are crucial to adult sanity. Perhaps we should start conserving them, like areas of outstanding natural beauty, so rare are they becoming – at least in my little corner of north London (which I’ll admit is a particularly bad example). I heard dark murmurings recently that a “children’s cafe” had opened. There are posters for “Baby Folk” lessons all over the place – because what every exhausted parent wants is to listen to repeat renditions of Battle of the Bean Field on the tambourine, performed by a troupe of toddlers. And that’s before you even start on the pubs.
It’s not just London either. The problem is more a particular type, who combines relaxed, liberal parenting in public with hypercompetitive child worship in private. You don’t see these people in the local Wetherspoons, put it that way – and thus, in many of the more unfashionable family pubs (Brewer’s Fayre, with its soft play area and ice cream factory, was our family favourite) you can find perfectly pleasant children. I’m not against all children in all pubs all the time: I quite like the young mums who all head down to my local on a weekday afternoon and drink from bowl-like glasses of wine, chatting while their newborns sleep in pushchairs nearby. But you can’t, as Morris has, ban one type of child and not another, just as you can’t always control whether or a child behaves well or not.
In some ways, the increased presence of children in adult spaces reflects progress: no longer are little ones expected to be seen and not heard, they are, in most homes, loved, cherished, and listened to. I would not like to see my area return to how it was in the 1980s, when my mother recalls seeing a child with foetal alcohol syndrome sitting on the steps of the Drum & Monkey every day, while his parents drank inside. In the old days, if you were lucky, your dad might lock you in the car and bring you a bag of crisps if you hooted the horn for long enough, but parents can’t do that now, because of child neglect laws, and the prohibitive cost of on-street parking in the London borough of Islington.
Perhaps children in pubs reflect a greater equality, too. If dad wants to go down the pub for a few then he has to take “the missus” and kids as well. No more rolling in at 4am stinking of Spitfire – women want in on the fun. Childcare costs are prohibitive as well. I do sympathise, and don’t think that you should lose your identity and your social life just because you have children. It’s just that sometimes I want a drink or a coffee without a six-year-old screaming in my ear. Then again, who doesn’t?
Cougar frown
As someone terrified into premature fertility anxiety by the media, it was good to see coverage of the male biological clock for a change. According to McGill University in Montreal, older women could be choosing younger lovers because of a biological imperative. After a certain age, a drop in testosterone levels can cause defective sperm – sperm for which a younger woman’s eggs can compensate but an older woman’s can’t. Because of this, “older women in their forties need a man as young as they can get”, said lead researcher Michael Dahan, before adding: “Men are not good forever.” Am I allowed a smidge of schadenfreude?
The findings were inevitably touted as an explanation for the “cougar” phenomenon, a term I hate because it implies older women are fearsome predators while young men are youthful wildebeest at their sexual peak, prime for pouncing on by the local watering hole. Not so in reality, older female friends tell me. They’re batting the younger guys away on dating websites. The phrase “age is just a number” comes to mind, though as someone who is seeing an older man I admit that cultural references can also be a problem, as when I took him to a 90s-themed party. “This song only came out about five minutes ago,” he said, before a guy in a denim jacket grilled him on what life was like before the internet. Poor old man.
