The importance of party bags

My daughter loves parties. She loves cake and singing happy birthday and, above all, she loves party bags. Parenting forums such as Mumsnet are often full of threads bemoaning the plastic tat you get in party bags and suggesting you give kids a book or donate to charity instead. Well my daughter loves plastic tat, as did I. Give her a pot of bubbles, a balloon and a plastic dinosaur and you'll have a special place in her heart. Not that she doesn't like books or do-gooding as well, but they don't really suit the frivolity or jollity of a party.

We went to a party yesterday. She went to bed talking about her party bag and woke up asking for it. We will make a special trip to the park this afternoon just to blow the party bag bubbles and chase them. Ah, the small, yet massive, pleasures, that make up a childhood.

It's things such as these that upset me most about the 'Bedroom Tax' and benefit cuts. Well that and denying people enough money to have housing and food and clothing. Those tiny things that me and George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith probably think cost hardly anything, that we are making even harder for people on benefits to afford. A pot of bubbles. Birthday candles. A balloon. A day out to a museum with 50p to spend in the shop. An apple juice in the cafe after a run around the park. A present if you are invited to a birthday party. Just make a card you say? Sure - but how to afford the paper and crayons? A swim in the pool in the school holidays. The bus fare to go and see a friend. A magazine or comic that you have absolutely set your heart on. A piece of cake.

I don't go in for vouchers instead of money. Zoe Williams explains why perfectly in her column here. But even if you don't object to a voucher scheme, what would you do? A voucher for a candle? A voucher for a bubble?

That's the thing about this Government that strikes me even more than any other - they are not only anti-aspirational, using rhetoric about getting into work (what work?) and improving lives to actually make lives harder and dull any aspiration by removing the likelihood of achieving it, but they are actually preventing a whole generation of children from having what they and their own children take for granted, and should take for granted - the occasional thrills of an everyday party bag that to some is tat, but that is far far more precious than that.

A tale of two city parks

We've been spending a fair bit of time in London's Bloomsbury recently and, when our need for a swing, a loo, a climbing frame, a sandpit, a bench shaped like a train, a cafe or some goats and chickens overcomes us, we head to Coram's Fields, a park that you are only allowed to enter if you are with a child. If those facilites don't sound enough for you, consider this - once, about a year ago, I even spotted Damian Lewis there.

Before I had a child I was desperately jealous of the friends who got to hang out there, not because there aren't other parks in London I could go to, but because when friends got together there for a day out it was just so excluding. Now I can go, I'm a bit ambivalent about the place. Because although in theory it has everything you want in a park, including a well stocked children's centre with a drop in play session for the under fives complete with craft materials, judgey staff, polite notices and children with ridiculous names, it seems wrong to have a park solely for people with children. It gives across a Daily Mail-esque message that all adults without children who wish to go to a park are paedophiles, and, conversely, that everyone with a child is not a paedophile, both statements being untrue of course.

The other day we went to the park next door to Coram's Fields, Brunswick Square Gardens. It has more flowers than Coram's Fields, and flowers, along with pigeons, are my daughter's favourite things at the moment, having usurped ducks and dogs. The sun was shining, the daffodils were trumpeting spring and the plane tree in the middle, which according to the Camden Council website is "the finest example of a London plane tree to be found anywhere in Camden" and listed as a 'Great Tree of London' by the charity Trees for Cities, was resplendent. One thing was missing however, for though it looked lke a park and smelled like a park, it wasn't the slice of society that parks usually are - for there were no children, and it was rather sad.

And the world just carried on

I was in bed last night when everyone else was watching news of the Libyan revolution on tv. I saw some tweets about it and considered going downstairs to watch the news but, well, I was in bed. Bad enough that a mere sniffle from the baby will have me out of bed in seconds, I don't need to get up for Gaddafi as well. 

Turns out that the world keeps, well, being a world, even when you opt out for a bit. I haven't really watched the news since the baby was born except to see how close to my house the riots were creeping last month. Not because, as many parents report, it's too sad, but because the only world I am interested in right now is governed not by coups and revolutions but by naps and purée and poo - poonamis, poocanos and poonatural disasters. Oh I might be too tired to watch the news but the fun that can be had with poo puns is endless. 

The first of the revolutions, the one in Tunisia, started as I struggled to nurse my two day old baby from my hospital bed. If you had asked me then what was going on in the world I could have told you that it was snowing in London, because my bed was by the window and I remember taking her from my breast to show the baby the snow. "You won't realise it now," I told her, "but snow in the south of England, it's a rare excitement. In years to come you will remember snow days off school, snowmen in our garden, snowball fights with kids on the street, perhaps even a white Christmas, as occasional magical days." She probably gave me the bemused look, my two day old baby, that she gives me now when I explain on our walks through the park that acorns come from oak trees and that there are no known cases of a conker fight 'having an eye out' and the rest of my cod knowledge of trees and nature. 

Did I look at the newspaper left by my bed and read about the revolution and say to my daughter that the world was changing, that her first year would probably go down in history as a year that changed the course of civilisation, that events in Tunisia would lead to events in Egypt and events in Libya and change across the Middle East? No, I told her about the snow and barely noticed events in the wider world.

And that has been the last eight months. My immediate world has become fascinating and the world at large seems of little relevance. It's as if having a child has turned me into a child, and only the immediate matters. I see the weather forecast for today is sunny. I do hope so.