My Easter break has kicked off early, due entirely to working both days last weekend. So as of this morning, I am free. Until Tuesday morning. It has, of course, in the greatest British bank holiday tradition, started raining. Heavily. The TV is full of 10% off adverts for Homebase and images of families decorating/gardening/travelling/visiting stately homes (delete as appropriate) together. The most concerning news for me, however (apart from Brian Wilde sadly passing away) has been that Crown have sought to make odour-free paints.
The smell of emulsion is one of the defining points of my childhood, as I remember the outrage when my parents decided to stop wallpapering the house and paint the walls instead. Ahh yes, the joys of ripping off whole sheets of wallpaper from the skirting board to the ceiling. And the torture of having to remove the final scraps seemingly welded to the wall. No mean feat for a nail-biter like myself.
Anyway, the smell of paint. Generally to reduce it, we tended to open windows and doors, which also ensured that the paint dried that much quicker. So, does this development of odour-free paint reveal anything about British society? Are we so nannied that we cannot survive with the smell of paint for a couple of hours? Are we afraid to open our doors and windows even when we are in the house? Do we all simply have too much money to indulge in these extravagances?
I ask only as these questions have been laying on my mind thanks to the wonderful, if slightly concerning BBC3 programme ‘Freaky Eaters‘ – in which a psychologist and nutritionist try (and generally succeed) to get people with aversions to types of food to overcome these problems and become rounded, valuable members of society. When I say aversions to food, I don’t just mean they dislike broccoli (who doesn’t?), but they will have lived 26 years (as the guy on it last night did) eating only biscuits and chocolate bars (somehow he had become head chef at an Italian restaurant), or the woman who ate only bread and tinned soups, or the guy who had only eaten meat since the age of four. They had never tasted cheese. Or vegetables. Or fish.
How is this possible? With the exception of the States, where most individual rights (and wrongs) are permissible, I cannot imagine that a show would be seen as anything other than a comedy – the victims/patients are lauded for trying a sliver of orange (or banana, as they are not the only fruit), and we get o watch them gagging as they try potato or cabbage for the first time. It was suggested last night that the psychological issues that underpin these aversions are similar to those that we Westerners would feel if presented with locusts or scorpions (I have images of the banquet scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom here), although these also play on Western antipathy towards all things creepy-crawly (and I wonder where that comes from, as there are very few poisonous/dangerous arthropods in Europe). Orientalism?
I myself was a fussy eater when younger, and speaking with the true zealousness of one converted to eating almost anything now, going hungry helps in this. If there is nothing else to eat, you will eat it. Unless, of course, you have an allergy to it, or it is broccoli. My thought would have been that if my child ate only biscuits, do not keep biscuits in the house. Although, obviously it is much easier to give in to these demands, or to assume it is a phase they are going through (not in the 10cc sense), the issue is that my generation has been the first in which it has been possible to defer growing up almost indefinitely (well, till 30-something at least), and, in fact there are whole facets of industries geared up just to this Peter Pan like obsession with our childhoods – DVDs of TV shows, School Disco, constant evenings of nostalgia on TV, re-releases of sweets and chocolate bars (I am convinced that it is only the over-30′s who buy Star Bars and Party Rings), and reissues of Star Wars toys, Marvel comics, etc. Essentially you can now relive (or even create) your childhood in its entirety at a higher cost and with slightly better quality than 20-odd years ago. Or, indeed, you can simply never leave it in the first place.
