And the moral of the story is... (From Watford Observer)

And the moral of the story is...

11:20am Monday 15th March 2010

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It was with great interest that I noticed a snippet tucked away in last week’s Watford Observer about Three Rivers District Council’s newly launched youth section on its climate change awareness website.

As I meditatively rubbed my chilblains - the podiatric legacy of the coldest winter and spring for 31 years - I read to the end of this small news item, and was fascinated to learn that the council’s “Our Climate is Changing” site “promotes understanding of the environment with help from new characters, RIC the Robot and the Randomiser 3000, who provide facts and guidance about recycling.”

I’m sure this is a well-intentioned attempt to satisfy some government tick box, but really, I ask you, can you actually imagine anyone, let alone a “youth“, logging on to find out more?

I’d practically nodded off myself before I got to the third line.

These are tricky times for children who appear to be on the receiving end of a neverending stream of the most tedious, moralising claptrap. Whether it’s on TV, in a book, at an infant birthday party, in a lesson and even at a pantomime, for goodness sake, these days there always seems to be some hidden message designed to prompt the young consumer to take a moment out of what should be their lovely, care-free existence and worry about the horrendous fate awaiting humanity if we don’t all buck up our idea and start putting the right sort of waste in our recycling bins.

Believe me, I’m not against cleaning up our act and smartening up the planet, but I do think that the average five-year-old has better things to do with their time than spend sleepless nights fretting about a possible future scenario that includes their pet dog and guinea pigs clinging to a floating packing case while the sea levels rise over South Oxhey.

Last week, my friend’s daughter Kitty celebrated her fifth birthday. My present to her was brightly coloured, sparkle-encrusted, ‘Barbie Thumbelina’ doll complete with a DVD box set comprising ‘Thumbelina -The Movie’ and ‘Barbie Fairytopia‘.

How her mother and I laughed when we read the packaging on the enormous box containing the tiny 100% plastic doll. Apparently, the cardboard was “totally recyclable” and what’s more, it included lots of handy hints on saving the planet from no less an authority than Barbie herself - who I‘d never, not even in my wildest dreams, imagined it possible to bracket with Jonathan Porrit.

Considering Kitty’s current devotion to all things made of layers and layers of pink sequined Nylon, somehow I didn’t think the eco-message on the box containing the doll was going to make much of an impression.

But the packaging was nothing compared to insidious preachy note of the films, which gave the impression that all fairies were some sort of miniature eco-task force, ready to pop into spangled planet-saving action, every time a human plonked the wrong coloured glass in a bottle bank.

It made me quite nostalgic for the downright bitchiness of Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell and even for some of the nastier fairy characters immortalised by the Brothers Grimm. I certainly don’t want my memories of Cinderella’s fairy godmother sullied by the replacement of her wand with something as mundane as a litter picker.

To be fair to Kitty, she was initially quite interested in all the wings, blonde hair and pink dresses on show, but even she gave up before the film came to an end, sensibly wandering off to the kitchen in search of birthday cake.

Her mum gratefully zapped the off button and poured herself another glass of wine (as it’s still Lent, I was having a diet cola from a bottle made of recycled glass).

“It’s all rather wearing, isn’t it?” she sighed, after a quick slurp. “All that moralising - and it’s everywhere, you know. You can’t pick up a book for reading aloud at bedtime these days without having some do-goody message about the importance of always being nice or saving the planet rammed down your throat.”

She continued: “I wouldn’t mind if these books were actually entertaining, but most of the time they are just simplistic and dull. When we’re reading them together I feel like I am beating my child over the head with a blunt message.”

Tellingly, she then outlined a recent incident when she and Kitty had started a bed-time book together. It was the story of a mouse living in the jungle who - for some utterly unfathomable reason - had taken it upon herself to visit all her neighbours and tell them to clear up their patch.

“God, it was dull!” my friend said. “That mouse was a real know-all. And do you know what the worst thing was?”, she added, taking another sip. “It was inaccurate, too. I mean, there are no tigers in Africa, are there?”

I ventured that there were probably no talking, eco-busting mice either, but I couldn’t help agreeing that the publisher had decided to sacrifice geographic precision in favour of environmental awareness.

Sadly, neither Kitty nor her mother ever got to the denouement of eco-mouse‘s clean-up mission. The story was so incredibly boring that the pair of them apparently nodded off mid-sentence. My friend woke two hours later to find both her daughter and her right arm (wrapped around her offspring and propping up the book) soundly asleep.

Now, although Kitty is a typical fairy-mad, pink-obsessed five-year-old girl, she is also typical in that, like every small child, there’s nothing she likes more in a story than a good dollop of black comedy, pain, subversion and rebellion. She never falls asleep when her mum is reading anything by Roald Dahl to her, for example.

I think it says a lot for her junior critical faculties that tales of litter-picking fairies and naggy rodent recyclers don’t cut the mustard. Mind you, there’s light at the end of the tunnel for any purse-lipped environmentalists reading this.

Last week, Kitty and her class read the story of the Three Little Pigs, and their homework (I know, she’s only five, for goodness sake!) was to create a ‘picture map’ showing the story.

My friend looked at Kitty’s drawings, which appeared to be a little more, um, visceral than the story she remembered from her own school days. The Big Bad Wolf was clearly licking his lips in a couple of drawings and there appeared to be a pool of blood outside the remains of the house made of sticks.

“Er, Kitty, what’s happened to the first two little pigs ?” enquired my friend a tad anxiously.

Kitty looked at her picture map and then back at her mum before replying confidently: “The wolf has recycled them.”