The Horror!

Memo to parents: if your child begins to scream in a public place and you cannot placate it within a reasonable time-frame, take the brat out of the public place. Not everybody is in thrall to your 'joyous' bundle and not everybody delights in having their eardrums skewered by your shrieking progeny. Today at the Natural History Museum is a case in point. Be warned! I carry a sharpened screwdriver in my bag for such emergencies.

Further, upstairs in the great galleries, a blonde child with thick glasses began its mindless caterwauling of self-interest. The parents ignored it and so it raised the pitch and volume of its screaming. Still the parents ignored it and so it threw itself onto the floor and began screaming at the top of its lungs and kicking its feet. It crossed my mind to slap the coke-bottle spectacles of its fat little head, but I was calmed by the serene figure of giant Darwin, carved in marble, and so I went downstairs for a cup of English Breakfast tea instead.

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