Bringing up children is a very serious business. Judging by the number of books written about it, it’s far too serious to be left to parents.

A lot of drivel has been written about parenting. Admittedly, not all of it is drivel – the work of Dr. Benjamin Spock is a good example of more enlightened thinking – but, by and large, it’s drivel. So it’s up to The Opposite to set the record straight on the thorny problem of how to bring up your kids.

First of all, babies and toddlers are cute. That’s not surprising because they were designed that way. Nature found out at a very early point that offspring that were not cute tended to get abandoned, exposed on hillsides, etc. So kids have big eyes, cute little noses and all of the rest of the paraphernalia that we adults find endearing. And if you don’t believe that we are programmed to find big eyes and cute little noses endearing, just take a look at some of the young ladies who are generally regarded as pretty in later life. Yep, there are the same wide blue eyes and cute noses.

Brigitte Bardot at the age of 1 month.

Secondly, babies and toddlers are frighteningly intelligent and cold-bloodedly manipulative. If you think those sweet little smiles and gurgles and those wide-eyed looks are in any way a reflection of the child’s love for its parents, think again. They will smile and gurgle and look wide-eyed at anyone that looks like a reasonable meal-ticket. The smart baby would even smile at a deranged axe-murderer. It’s all to do with undeveloped vocal cords. Given a choice in the matter, the baby would obviously prefer to say “Quit the business with the rattle and just give me some milk will you?” but that will have to wait for a few months.

Babies have developed the business of manipulation to a fine art. If the smiles and gurgles won’t produce the desired effect, the next step is to howl your head off. And babies have also developed howling to a point that would put any self-respecting air-raid siren to shame. I mean have you ever seen an air-raid siren turn red, let alone purple? So the doting parent will panic and try to provide what the child wants. Rattle? No, howling increases by an octave. How about cute fluffy bunny? Howling doubles in volume and covers several octaves simultaneously. Plastic pig? Howling approaches the pain threshold and glassware in the kitchen starts to vibrate. What can it be? What can it be? Speak to me, will you? Einstein the baby octopus? Yes! Yes! It’s Einstein the baby octopus!
And we’re back to smiling and gurgling.

Josef Goebbels at the age of 1 month.

What is it about a baby howling that can reduce parents to quivering jelly? It’s certainly not anything to do with size. How can such a small mouth and lungs produce such deafening volume?
The answer, of course, is that the baby does not produce a deafening volume. We think it’s a deafening volume because we’re programmed to respond to it in that way. Just as we’re programmed to respond to the smiles and gurgles, the cute nose and the wide eyes. And the baby, not being a total moron, knows exactly which buttons to press.

This basic process continues well into childhood if not into adolescence. The tactics change, of course, but the basic strategy remains the same. The last thing the child wants is to fend for itself and it prefers to get exactly what its little heart desires rather than compromise. Kids don’t understand the concept of compromise any more than we understand what happened before the Big Bang. So, if you ask one parent for something and get a negative response, the obvious thing to do is to ask the other parent and then claim that the first parent said it was okay. In the interests of parental solidarity, the second parent will more likely than not endorse the alleged opinion of the first parent. The child has won the battle and will quite happily sit back and watch both parents squabble over who said what.

And, of course, children are quick to realise the power of peer-group pressure. What better time to misbehave can there be than at a large family gathering, preferably with a majority shareholding of people aged 60 and over? Criticise or chastise your child at your peril! “Oh he’s alright,” they will croon as your dear offspring pours chocolate sauce over the antique damask tablecloth. “You used to do the same when you were that age”. This is a barefaced lie. If you had done the same at that age you would have been hanged drawn and quartered before you could mumble “Yeah, but…”

Cleaning up after a children's party.

Another thing that I find quite appalling is this belief on the part of parents that certain food is not suitable for children. Like hot curries and fish eggs, for example. Not to mention olives. Wherever you go, you find “children’s menus”, in other words, bland, overcooked stodge with apple purée. Let’s get one thing straight, children are not born with a built-in predisposition to apples, chocolate, ice-cream, sweets or any of the other rubbish that well-meaning parents force down them. In fact, in less favoured parts of the world, kids have to make do with a zippingly fiery chilli soup day one. Or a handful of rice, or a few lumps of manioc. You don’t hear them complain. Not as long as they have an adequate supply of it.

But in the western world, we far too often feed our kids junk. And then we wonder why they grow up to eat junk food and become horrendously overweight. So let’s make a deal, shall we? Once your kids are old enough to eat solid food, give them exactly the same food as you eat yourself. They won’t miss the apple purée and you won’t have to cook two separate meals. They might develop a fondness for marinated olives or a sincerely deep love of chilli con carne.

A typical kids' breakfast.

Even scarier than providing your kids with “children’s food” is talking to them as if they were children. The most horrible version of this is the sing-song intonation and the over-use of words like “little” and “small”. Okay, so kids are small – there’s no need to rub it in. Talk normally, for God’s sake. How are children to acquire an adequate vocabulary if all they hear is Telly-Tubbies?

And, last of all, the very best word that you can say to a child is “no”. Practice saying it and then use it in reply to every request. “Can I have…?” “No”. There’s no need to be mean about it – you can say it quite matter-of-factly. As your child gradually gets used to the fact that the answer to every request is “no”, imagine the surprise and joy when you occasionally say “yes”. Don’t overdo it though – once a month is quite sufficient.

If you doubt me, think of the money you’ll save.

So that’s it for The Opposite’s guide to parenting. As a final note, and if you’re new to the business, just remember this: kids have been successfully born and reared now for countless generations. And so have chickens.

As you should know by now, or as you will know shortly when you take the trouble to read some of the archive material, this is an absolutely serious site. However, be that as it may – and it is - there are people who have actually told me that it’s funny, which just goes to show how strange some people can be. The fact is that this site is NOT funny. Not in the slightest. The Second World War was funnier than this.

Nevertheless (I just love that word, don’t you? Particularly when you say it with great force, lending each syllabub an equal sugary weight)…um…nevertheless, the fact that some misguided people have regarded this entirely serious site as funny led me to think about what humour (or as Americans call it, humor) actually is. Where did it come from? Where is it going? What’s the point of it?

Well, according to a few rather risqué cave paintings in the caverns of Lascaux in France, which date from approximately 14,000 BC, humour (humor) was invented by a black man with long legs and a bobbly head. He also brandished a bow and arrow, which nowadays is de rigeur for any stand-up comic but was something of a novelty 16,000 years ago. If you weren’t a hunter, that is. The joke that is featured on the cave walls of Lascaux was allegedly something to do with a small porcupine that fell down a hole. I say ‘allegedly’ as this painting was subsequently listed on the Papal Index and now resides in a dark cellar in the Vatican where it can only be viewed by archbishops between Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Actually, the creature in question may not have been a small porcupine. Eye-witnesses swear blindly that it was a giant ostrich that had fallen backwards onto a patch of bamboo shoots, but it’s probably safest to take the traditional view and settle for the porcupine. After all, although humour (humor) had now been invented, perspective had not.

So now we come to the hole. In the Lascaux paintings, we can clearly see that this is a hole. Because it’s small, black and round. Arguably it could have been an extremely large full stop (US: period) but this would have made it a very short joke indeed. As in ‘small porcupine, thank you, thank you, you’re a wonderful audience’. However, as undeveloped as the Neolithic sense of humour (humor) might have been, this is stretching a one-liner a little too far. It’s true that the hole could also have represented a pit for trapping the said small porcupine but the presence of several other black men with long legs and bobbly heads gathered around the hole and applauding wildly seems to suggest not.

Half of a neolithic joke.

So we have a Neolithic joke. Its actual punch-line has been lost in the mists of time but no doubt it was killingly funny, to anything that wasn’t a small porcupine, for whom it was probably just killing.
Leaping forwards by about 15,000 years – which you can do quite easily in a blog – we come to the Renaissance joke. The problem with the Renaissance joke was that while it was extremely clever - jumping effortlessly between music, graphic art, drama, science and poetry – it wasn’t all that funny. In fact it was downright pathetic. I mean, if you think that ‘who was that lady I saw you with last night that was no lady that was my wife’ is to any degree risible, then you are probably on a par with some of the great Renaissance thinkers.

The best example of the Renaissance joke is probably the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was painted by Michelangelo Buonarotti on a Wednesday evening in 1509 after a night at the pub with the lads. Michelangelo (just call me Mike) was not noted for his sense of humour (humor) and could barely understand a joke, let alone tell one. However, after a glass or three of Chianti, Mike did get the point of a humorous anecdote that was told to him by Giuseppe Rossi, a dirt merchant from Padua. Sadly, like most of us, Michelangelo could not totally remember the joke the following morning. Somehow the punch-line eluded him. It was something about God, Adam and a prickly artichoke but exactly how the vegetable fitted in was now lost in a particularly nasty hangover. So to try to recover the punch-line, he did what most of us do. He doodled. Of course, it helps enormously if you’re doodling on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and not on some scrap of paper you found in your back pocket and the result is now acclaimed as a masterpiece of Renaissance art. Giuseppe Rossi, however, would not have agreed.

These two guys went into a bar...

Eighteenth-century humour (humor) is known for its urbanity. In fact, it was so excessively urbane that by the time the punch-line of any eighteenth-century joke arrived, the audience had usually lost the plot entirely and was in such a state of drunkenness and mild hysteria that it would have laughed at Robert Walpole reading his shopping list. The greatest and, indeed, longest joke in the eighteenth-century is the epistolary novel ‘Clarissa’ by Samuel Richardson, the famous cricketer. This joke, in nine volumes, ends with the words ‘no longer than a fairy tale’, which is, in fact, the punch-line. Eight volumes earlier, (and after a lengthy preface and list of characters) the joke starts with ‘I am extremely concerned’. What happens in the middle is anyone’s guess but I believe it has something to do with a visit to the doctor.

The Clarissa joke - title page.

Nineteenth-century humour (humor) was a waste of time until the invention of Oscar Wilde. Although having a preface and list of characters for every joke had now become the norm, Oscar swept this aside, with jokes like ‘all art is quite useless’, which is frankly what we had all known for quite some time but it took Oscar to actually say it.

And so we come, at last to ‘modern humour (humor)’. Modern humour (humor) has no better representative than Dame Ben Elton. It consists mostly of drawing a small porcupine and a hole on a cave wall. However, in this case there are no long-legged black men with bobbly heads. Just a small porcupine. And a hole.

As human beings, we have a vested interest in keeping abreast of the latest developments in disease. And let’s not beat around the bush, diseases are evolving at a considerable rate. We’ve had bird flu, now we have swine flu, and shortly we’ll probably have hamster flu or even the extremely dreaded but so far hypothetical broccoli flu. The world is about to melt down into a pandemic that will reduce its entire population to three quantity surveyors in Bradford, Illinois.

So, in the interests of public safety, The Opposite considers it a duty to inform you of the latest and most interesting diseases to pose a threat to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. Brace yourselves for a shock.

These diseases are:

Atkinson’s Chorea. Atkinson’s Chorea, not to be confused with North and South Chorea or A Promising Chorea in the Civil Service, is a motor-neurone disease affecting the individual’s ability to turn left. This can lead to great distress on the part of sufferers, who typically try to conceal their affliction by referring to themselves as ‘Right Thinking’.

Fortunately, the only people to suffer from Atkinson’s Chorea are people called Atkinson and then only in the ratio of 1:100,000. An aspect of the disease that has baffled scientists for many years is that it is not genetic in origin. Anyone called Atkinson can suffer from Atkinson’s Chorea – even those who have changed their name to Atkinson by deed-poll. Fortunately this also means that suffers can be cured totally by simply changing their name to something else.

Atkinson's Chorea attempting to turn left.

Gordonbroonism. A disease that specifically targets British prime ministers – well, only one of them actually – and which manifests itself in an inability to get anything right. It also affects the eyesight and the ability to smile properly. Gordonbroonism is a refined form of the disease incompetensia which has decimated the ranks of politicians since…well, since politicians started, quite frankly.

Sadly, there is no known cure for Gordonbroonism and, as it seems to affect only one person, there is little hope of a medical breakthrough.

Mumbles. Mumbles is a disease of adolescence that combines two of the best features of mumps and measles: a runny nose and a swollen ego. The first symptoms of mumbles include a sharp decline in vocabulary, the inability to combine more than a few words into a single coherent sentence, and a concomitant rise in the patient’s belief that he or she knows everything and is, in fact, a misunderstood genius who is the victim of a world-wide conspiracy.

In its advanced stages, Mumbles reduces the patient to being able to say little except ‘uh’, ‘like’ and ‘innit’. However the prognosis is generally good: patients tend to recover within a five-year period, although, like, a few of the symptoms may carry over into adult life, innit.

A bad case of the mumbles.

Bacterial Brown Spot. This used to be a disease afflicting beans only but recent years have seen a disturbing spread, via other leguminosae, to the human population. The main symptom is …erm… a brown spot. This spot may appear on any part of the body at the most unexpected and, indeed, embarrassing of times. It may also vary in size between what may at first be mistaken for a standard small brown pimple to something resembling a golf ball. In fact some of the larger varieties have been known to carry logos like the Nike swoosh.

Sadly, there is no known cure for Bacterial Brown Spot. The good news is that it’s certainly not life-threatening and a really bad dose could solve all your golf ball problems. As long as you want them brown.

Non-specific gastro-intestinal geraniums (NSGIG). This is a silly but highly infectious disease transmitted through intimate contact with geranium plants. According to WHO statistics, it currently afflicts 0.00000000023% of the global population, all of whom live in Surbiton, England. In this context, ‘non-specific’ refers to the variety of geranium. Tulip-flowered are considered benign, while cactus-flowered and shrubby-leaved are not only malignant but extremely painful since, in advanced stage, Non-specific Gastro-intestinal Geraniums inevitably leads to sprouting of said plants through the anal orifice. According to WHO guidelines, geraniums should not be accepted as gifts from persons unknown to you, and you should always wash your hands thoroughly afterwards. Avoid eye contact.

The dreaded geranium. Scourge of the colon.

Blackwater sneezing. Sneezing is, at the best of times, a highly debilitating condition but Blackwater Sneezing is certainly its most hazardous form. As early as 532 BC, the Roman amateur doctor Servius Quacus defined the condition as ‘quispiam meus uxor res ut’ or ‘something my wife objects to’. This is understandable as the average blackwater sneeze has a range of approximately 27.5 metres and has been known to stun low-flying birds. Particularly the ostrich. (Actually, this may have been Austrian and not Ostrich – the Latin text having been rendered partially illegible due to the side-effects of the said sneeze).

Incurable.

Spotz. This is the British regional variation of a disease that has been prevalent in the United States for many years: Zitz. Spotz is transmitted through text communications on mobile telephones and Internet chat services. But IMHO it hasn’t affected 2many PPL 2date. Like Zitz, Spotz, usually presents as an inability to spel accompanied by a cutaneous eruption on the side of the face closest to the mobile fone. In advanced stages hit develops into a repeated shouting of ‘yo’ and the giving and receiving of indecipherable handshakes.

NATO is currently investigating the possibility of using Spotz as a non-invasive alternative to thermo-nuclear war.