I Am A Trampoline, My Niece Is A Hat

Continuing on from my last post, since I didn't exactly go into detail about the weekend... It's very interesting to watch my young niece develop.

She'll be turning three next month, and is very much in the throes of The Terrible Twos, playing up for her parents while at home, but being nice as pie when visiting Grandma and Granddad and Uncle. Other than the typical contrariness, refusals to go to bed and refusals to get out of bed, I'm not sure of the precise details of her offences. Whenever I see her, she's bright and lively and (largely) polite, but clearly has the affliction of all children: she firmly believes she is - or should be - the centre of everyone's attention, all the time. That's kind of how it should be, at that age.

The funny thing is, one of my birthday present books discusses the way we are all born with infinite imagination, and that it gets drummed out of us with facts and statistics and procedures and all kinds of learning, to the point where we are afraid of expressing ourselves. Being terribly old now, I don't really remember experiencing the great sense of freedom that I see in my niece.

But then, chances are, she's not aware of it - it's all just 'normal' to her, the way the world works around her, and bends to her will.

To wit: I placed a plushie toy lion upon my head and declared that it is my hat... Niece denies my reality. I place an old ice cream tub upon my head and declare that it is my stylish new hat, emphasising my truth by posing dramatically and stroking my chin. She giggles and decides that my father, too, needs a hat... but not just any hat... and certainly not a junk mail leaflet hat. Oh, no. Granddad must have the borough council's glossy magazine as a hat.

But then it goes further... because the ice cream tub is not sufficiently stylish. Niece decides that she must make the ultimate sacrifice and become my hat. She clambers onto the sofa behind me, up onto my shoulders, then flops down, her belly upon my crown, her face dangling in front of mine. "I'm your hat!"

This happens two or three times before she gets bored and moves on to something new.

If course, this noble gesture comes at a price. Later on, she decides that I must be tickled... and not just that, but I must lie prone upon the floor for this to happen. She didn't find a single ticklish area (but, to be honest, I had kept my shoes on, so that wouldn't help) but I giggled along nevertheless. By the by, she stands upon my chest and, without a care in the world, proceeds to bounce.

My sister immediately grabbed her and pointed out that "we don't bounce on people", while I proceed from coughing to spluttering to laughter...

I am a Trampoline, my niece is a Hat.

This, gentle reader, is magic.

She also fibs, ever so slightly. While brandishing her plushie toy lion and growling at me, she instructed Granddad to "tell off the lion" and, being a dutiful Granddad, he complied... but then she went all mopey and subdued (but it's that kind of mopey and subdued, so you can tell she doesn't really mean it). When someone asked what was wrong, she mumbled that Granddad told her off.

Maybe she meant for him to tell off the plushie toy... but the distinction is sometimes difficult to make.

In other news... Work still going smoothly... Watched another two episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day. Still not very impressed with it. There are moments of brilliance (Vera's death is particularly chilling, but the events leading up to it are rather poorly done, and overplayed), but it's spending far too much time and effort in irrelevant things under the guise of 'characterisation' and that bête noire of genre television, 'conflict'... And Jack is just coming across as a colossal dick.

He's also veering from chummy-jokey-flirty to overly earnest and, for a pansexual traveller in time and space, there's a rather gratingly homophobic focus on his apparent preference for homosexual flings ("Oooh, Rex doesn't like his jokes too gay"... "Do you turn everyone around you gay?" "That's the plan..."). I don't know whether it's the American writers making the assumption that his sexuality must only work one way, or just plain bad writing...

...Or maybe I'm missing something, and it's a rough attempt at pointing out that Rex is making the outdated assumptions (a) that Jack is gay and (b) that it matters, and the writers are lampooning his attitudes? I dunno... something about it just doesn't sit right with me...

And Oswald Danes... I really can't figure out what he's doing in the story, and who thought it was a good idea to turn him into a figurehead. I mean, I know it's a very twisted world in Miracle Day... but he's stretching credulity already.

And The Soulless? Do they turn up again after Episode 3? I'd have thought that, in the midst of Oswald's rise, and the controversial 'Dead Is Dead' movement, The Soulless would me more apparent... but so far it's been little more than one candle parade of masked people.

Ah well... At least I'm watching it this time... And, I have to say, Murray Gold's score is awesome.