The Milk of Human Ignorance


    I was sitting having lunch and, as usual, people had brought their squalling brats into the establishment. At the next table two men and two women sat with a baby and two toddlers. The toddlers began to throw knives and forks onto the floor immediately and were allowed to do so by the oblivious parents. Then the toddlers began to loudly shout a list of farmyard animals, which went on interminably. Catching my look of disgust, one of the mothers pulled out half a dozen 'Mr Men' books from her bag and began to read them aloud to the brats. Her shrill voice rang around the room as she catalogued the exploits of Mr Naughty, Miss Shy and Mr Fucking Idiot. The other woman took her baby, which was now screaming, out of its pram and flopped out her right breast. In the manouvering of the child to its teat a thin dribble of milk sprayed out onto the table. 
    "Oh, damn!" she said to her gormless partner, "Jake, can you go and get a cloth?" Jake shuffled to the bar and came back with a cloth, with which he smeared the eruption over the surface of the table. Then he took the cloth back to the bar and, because the barman was now in the kitchen, threw it across to the shelves, where it landed next to the till, ready to be smeared over the bar later. He shuffled back to their table, where the others were discussing a friend's new baby [don't we have enough children in the world by now, for god's sake?]. Apparently they all disapproved of this baby's name. 
    "Arlo! Arlo! I mean, Arlo!", said one of the women, "What kind of a name is Arlo? I've never heard that before." The others all agreed, and laughed at this outrageous choice. As I left the noisy interior of the establishment I barely managed to stifle the urge to inform them of Arlo, son of Woody Guthrie. The juggernaut of general ignorance continues apace down the generations.

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