Nit-picking

I like listening to Afternoon Theatre (or whatever it’s called these days) on BBC Radio 4, but I switched it off this afternoon because I felt so irritated. There was a child in it who was old enough to be told to go and wash her hair, but whose mother talked to her thus: “Because Mummy says so,” and “Here – borrow Mummy’s umbrella.”

I don’t understand why some parents talk about themselves in the third person to their children, but accepting that some of them do, it is ridiculous to suppose that a woman would talk to a daughter this way if the daughter was old enough to go off and wash her own hair.

This blog post is so trivial it would have been better as a tweet, but a tweet, sadly, would not have sufficient characters to fit it in.