It's cruel child's play

School Nativity plays ? Pah!

It is shameful that teachers and parents put the fragile little egos of small children through the grinding mill of humiliation by:

1. Not picking him or her to be Joseph or Mary;
2. Not picking him or her to be a wise man or an angel;
3. Not picking him or her to be a shepherd or midwife (or whatever)
4. Not picking him or her. Full stop.

I speak hereof from painful experience, having fallen into category 4 on just about every occasion I can remember and still, today, suffer deep psychological damage which leaves me not responsible for my actions – that’s what my solicitor told the judge, anyway.

It was the same when we had what passed as music lessons – everybody got an instrument and played it on cue from the teacher, making a hell of a din

I always wanted to have a drum, a tambourine or anything to make a noise. And I always got the bloody triangle. Not much chance of creating mayhem with a small triangle and a little plastic triangle basher (what IS that thing called?)

Even while doing O-Level English, when classmates would act out scenes from Shakespeare’s soaps, the only part I got was as a corpse. Perhaps all these teachers were trying to tell me something.

My one and only big moment came in a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I auditioned for the part of Puck – and finished up as Bottom.
So I still got a bum part.

•BY the by, did you see the research done by doctors in Slough which concluded that we sneeze if we think of sex.
The young woman who sits next to me in the office sneezes a lot and blames the air conditioning but now we know it is simply my animal magnetism.
But I’m a tad worried about the bloke who sits on the other side of me…