Showing posts with label Fat Boy Slim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fat Boy Slim. Show all posts

Monday, 27 June 2016

Jump

We did Glastonbury again this year. 

We didn’t have to pay, we didn’t get trenchfoot, we didn’t have all the stuff nicked out of our tents, food and beer was cheap/free and plentiful, and we were right down the front for all the bands we wanted to see.

Yep, we did it at home. With the big screen pulled down, and presenter-free live feeds from the BBC red button/iPlayer beamed onto it.

My seven-year-old boy and his mate were on the door, sporting SECURITY T-shirts and armed with a guest list, a pen, and a sense of officiousness.

The party occured in two waves: an afternoon session and BBQ, with the kids left to go feral as they took part in an epic Nerf Gun War (the neighbours will be picking out foam bullets from their hedges for weeks to come).

Then there was a second evening rave wave.

My girl, who doesn’t like loud noises, loud music, or staying up late, made an amazing decision. Party rules were going to be applied. She didn’t reach for her ear defenders, she didn’t complain once about the volume levels, and she decided she wasn’t going to go to bed early as originally planned. 

“I’d like to stay up until 11,” she announced.

And then, the next thing I knew, Fat Boy Slim ‘dropped some beats’ (as I believe the yoof liked to say about 20 years ago) and me and some creaking middle-aged friends and some remaining bouncy kids did our literal interpretation to the lyrics of Norman’s remix of House Of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’. I say literal, because we did, indeed, ‘jump around’ and after five minutes of that my calves were burning, my heart was thumping, and I was in - if not a house of pain - at least a caravan, or maybe a bungalow of knackeredness.

But it was my girl, my girl, that got my heart really racing. She got up from the sofa and joined her dad in what can only be described as ‘throwing some shapes’. Not since her pogoing to Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, aged 6, have I been quite so surprised by her sudden enthusiasm for a random song.

This made me very happy. You can see that in the photos. (Grinning idiot on the left in the bottom pic, if it’s not obvious).



Video is a mobile phone YouTube video of Fatboy Slim's remix of Jump Around, just to give you some idea of what it was like in my front room. (It was a slightly smaller crowd, obviously).

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Choices

My daughter tied herself in knots today, struggling with choices.

She was red-eyed and wild-headed when she got home from school.

Her teachers are trying to gently wean her off her current obsession with Hello Kitty by trying to get her to occasionally choose something else when she has the option. 

She’s so single-minded about her inexplicable love for the Japanese animated cat character that she’s announced she doesn’t like anything apart from Hello Kitty.

So the innocent suggestion that maybe she could pick a different picture to be used on her reward tokens went down like a cat in a sack in a well.

The tokens are little laminated pictures that the teachers stick on the wall of the classroom under the pupils’ names when they complete good work, or behave well. Unsuprisingly, my daughter’s icons have a feline theme. And she really didn’t want to change them.

We had a good hour of discussion on the matter. I say discussion, it was like looping the loop on a verbal rollercoaster and ending up back where we started, slightly out of breath and with a headache.

After some further contemplation, however, she suddenly voiced a new mantra.

“I am going to try and be good with choices, Mum,” she informed me. “You have to learn to make choices, don’t you? That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try and choose different things. Because you need to choose, don’t you?”

I agreed. The first time she said it, and then the second, third, fourth and fifth. By the 50th, despite my ability to filter out the repetition (a skill I’ve developed over the years to cope with the perseveration element of her syndrome, although my Mum would say I’ve always had ‘selective hearing’) I’d lost interest and much of the will to live.

I patiently explained to her that perhaps she’d talked about this whole thing for a little bit too long and that it might possibly have started to become annoying.

She tipped her head to one side, raised her eyebrow, and gave me a withering look.

“It’s because I’ve got Prader-Willi Syndrome, mum. You should know that by now.”


Video is Fat Boy Slim - Weapon Of Choice

"You can go with this,
Or you can go with that".

Related posts: 
Magazine 
Perseveration