Lazy Parents: I Resemble That Remark

I like to take things easy
I like to take things easy

A funny little thing from the Daily Mail, (via the Times’ Motherlode blog): it seems that there has been a bit of a kerfuffle lately in merry ye olde England town over what parents choose to wear when dropping the laddies off at school. Too much pajamas! How can you have any pudding if you’re dropping Reginald at Eton in his jim-jams? (am I right in thinking if you mix a metaphor enough it works?)

Anyway, a school principal, we think in Belfast (the report on this one seems not have his full quid; hard to say where the school was) has been trying to get the parents to actually put on clothes when they leave the house. Shocking! Those tossers! The principal sent a letter home with the children saying that wearing your nighties to the school was “slovenly and rude.” How dast he! (all right that was my last exclamation point! Not that one was! This time I mean it)

This was done in the wake of an outright ban on shoppers wearing pajamas at Tesco grocery stores. Apparently, this is a minor cultural phenomenon in England. Seems strange to me–haven’t they heard of sweats?

A humorous aside from the article: the EU actually has a law preventing schools from banning pajamed parents. Now that’s socialism in action for you, ladies and gentlemen.

I can’t say as I have ever gotten JP to school in pajamas (I don’t own any). But I do recall a moment from my own childhood–I couldn’t have been older than five–when I was first allowed to select my own clothes. After much negotiation, my mother left me to my own devices, went off to work, and I dressed myself and headed to the bus with my older brother. Teacher sent me home that day with a note  not to wear footed pj’s to school, and now, to this day, my mother still chooses my clothes.

BREAKING DADWAGON NEWS UPDATE: Apparently this article was largely made up (or at least totally mis-reported). No school ban. No Tesco pj ban. Hahah! Don’t you just love the Internets? Shudder to think what other garbage the Times has allowed into the paper of record.

Published by Theodore

Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.

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