November 22. Day 326. Let them eat cake

The world has gone mad. This afternoon my mother called with an amusing tale of the new washing machine which came with a warning "not to be used by children under 8 or the elderly without supervision". She wondered if I would mind popping over every time she needed to put on a load of whites because clearly she could not be expected to turn a dial and push a button without help. Right. Arse protecting is now a huge business replacing what may once have been considered common sense.
This seems particularly true when it comes to kids where as a society we seem determined to wrap the little ones in cotton wool.
Many people are starting to push back and plenty of parents have reacted with horror at the notion that it is no longer okay to send one cake to school for birthdays. Blowing out the candles means blowing germs all over the cake everyone is about to eat. Individual cupcakes overcome this problem. Madness, you may well be saying. If you are saying that it's clear you were never in the room when my darling boy was a toddler. I'm pretty sure he thought the idea was to douse the candles in spit. It was either that or the amount of food colouring in the icing but something seemed to make people strangely reluctant to take a slice. Funny that. Of course, that doesn't apply to every child and most kids grow out of it after the toddler years. Certainly everyone was happy to share in the icecream cake for my niece Cleo's birthday, even after she's blown out the candles. Some greedy gutses even went back for seconds. I may or may not have been in the queue. Let's face it I have to make up for a few years when I decided to give the spit cake a miss. These days I'm happy to say "let them eat cake".