A very bright idea

[Clippy]

Argos or Tesco.

[MPwannadecentincome]

Hey suityou01, I can sympathise with your position I have 3 myself and two of them are too young to understand what "be quiet" or "sit quietly" means for more than 60 seconds!

So occasional distractions like a DVD player can be useful, especially long car journeys.

Be careful though, very young kids are very good at destroying electronic equipment, we are now on our 3rd set of DVD players and because of the squabbling about what to watch they have one each.

Actually having one each proves useful in the home, if the 9 yr old is watching Hannah Montana then the younger ones tend to watch something else on the portable DVD player.

So if your kids are old enough to look after the DVD player then get a good one that will last - sorry I have no recommendations - but if your kids are anything like mine get the cheapest possible and then prepare to replace when broken - ours were from Tesco, actually they have lasted a year already, I think that is a record for the 4 year old!

[rootsnall]

Medised or phenergan is what you need rather than calpol.

Medised. Top stuff, but you now have to tell a little white lie and say your kids are 7 or 8 or they won't give it to you. My lot have finally started sleeping naturally, so it comes as a shock when they don't, like last night It was the Mrs turn to go out boozing so I was on duty on my own

I still rely on counting bridges or CDs as entertainment when out in the car.

[RichardCranium]

I still rely on counting bridges

When I was little and we made long car journeys, my parents seemed to have loads of tricks like that.

Look for registration year letters but you can only go up by one at a time i.e. find an A reg, then a B reg etc. Repeat in reverse sequence.

Telling me stories of their own lives. (I loved that.) "Never turn down a cup of tea, Private. It might save your life." "The coal is for painting, not lighting."

Teaching me songs and we'd all sing along. "There was rats, rats, big as bloomin' cats in the stores, in the stores...". I think I can sing every Glenn Miller song ever written!

Telling me about the history of the region / place we were passing through.

Telling me things about what they had done when they had once passed through a place.

Getting me to explain to them about stuff I had learned in school that they had not been taught.

However, I was a child that always had library books on the go, so I could entertain myself by reading anyway. Children are still taught to read, aren't they?


With hindsight, through my childhood I must have had scores of hours of tuition by my parents in my family history, my background, my culture, my country. Is that something children are now not receiving? If so, it seems a terrible shame to lose all that to be replaced by Disney's outpourings.

[TheFaQQer]

I still rely on counting bridges or CDs as entertainment when out in the car.

If we are in the campervan then they have no choice - it's too noisy for DVDs (and for CDs too, really)!

Teaching me songs and we'd all sing along. "There was rats, rats, big as bloomin' cats in the stores, in the stores...". I think I can sing every Glenn Miller song ever written!

That's on the Singing Kettle Magic album, which we have in the car to sing along to.

With hindsight, through my childhood I must have had scores of hours of tuition by my parents in my family history, my background, my culture, my country. Is that something children are now not receiving? If so, it seems a terrible shame to lose all that to be replaced by Disney's outpourings.

It's a good point - the only time we use the DVDs is when we are driving through France and the girls have already been through a day of driving. Last time, I burnt an MP3 CD which alternated - one CD for them, one CD for us. That kept them happy (and asleep some of the time!) rather than spending the whole day moaning about where we were....

[suityou01]

When I was little and we made long car journeys, my parents seemed to have loads of tricks like that.

Look for registration year letters but you can only go up by one at a time i.e. find an A reg, then a B reg etc. Repeat in reverse sequence.

Telling me stories of their own lives. (I loved that.) "Never turn down a cup of tea, Private. It might save your life." "The coal is for painting, not lighting."

Teaching me songs and we'd all sing along. "There was rats, rats, big as bloomin' cats in the stores, in the stores...". I think I can sing every Glenn Miller song ever written!

Telling me about the history of the region / place we were passing through.

Telling me things about what they had done when they had once passed through a place.

Getting me to explain to them about stuff I had learned in school that they had not been taught.

However, I was a child that always had library books on the go, so I could entertain myself by reading anyway. Children are still taught to read, aren't they?


With hindsight, through my childhood I must have had scores of hours of tuition by my parents in my family history, my background, my culture, my country. Is that something children are now not receiving? If so, it seems a terrible shame to lose all that to be replaced by Disney's outpourings.

I don't know any cool stuff like that though. I'm dull, thick and mildly irritating. You can't choose your parents.

Intrigued to know why they painted coal. Praps your parents were total nutters?

[Sysman]

When I was little and we made long car journeys, my parents seemed to have loads of tricks like that.

Look for registration year letters but you can only go up by one at a time i.e. find an A reg, then a B reg etc. Repeat in reverse sequence.

I remember doing the car numbers thing. It was numbers rather than letters; in those days you could actually start out at 1 and work up.

But once we got a bit older there was no talking in the car. Weird but true.

[RichardCranium]

Intrigued to know why they painted coal.

When my Mum was in the Wrens she had some admin office job where she and a more junior rating shared a room in an old house which served some military purpose.

It was April and it started snowing outside. They got colder and colder and eventually my Mum started worrying about this girl she shared the office with; she was going blue. So my Mum lit the fire.

The tulip hit the fan: they were outside the official dates for being permitted to have fires and no officer had authorised the lighting of the fire. My mum was put on a charge, had to pay for the coal and then had to black lead the fireplace, stock it for lighting then whitewash the coal in the fireplace and the coal scuttle.

Her memorable bit was an NCO screaming at her "The coal is for painting, not for lighting".


As an aside, as any ex-forces bod will tell you: "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it."

[suityou01]

When my Mum was in the Wrens she had some admin office job where she and a more junior rating shared a room in an old house which served some military purpose.

It was April and it started snowing outside. They got colder and colder and eventually my Mum started worrying about this girl she shared the office with; she was going blue. So my Mum lit the fire.

The tulip hit the fan: they were outside the official dates for being permitted to have fires and no officer had authorised the lighting of the fire. My mum was put on a charge, had to pay for the coal and then had to black lead the fireplace, stock it for lighting then whitewash the coal in the fireplace and the coal scuttle.

Her memorable bit was an NCO screaming at her "The coal is for painting, not for lighting".


As an aside, as any ex-forces bod will tell you: "If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it."

Good times.

[RichardCranium]

I don't know any cool stuff like that though. I'm dull, thick and mildly irritating.

Surely you have stories of your own life? How you & Mrs SY01 met & courted? Things you have learned upon The Way of Life? Places you have been and things you have seen? What for you was a holiday in Spain is a fantasy about faraway lands to them. What about stories about your own parents and your own childhood? And what stories have you inherited from your grandparents, siblings and aunts & uncles?

If you do not practice recalling and telling the stories, they will be lost for ever.

I find it utterly horrific that there are cultures that have passed down stories for centuries and even millennia that will be discarded for Bambi, Dumbo, the feckin Aristocats and a poxy twat of a human-sized mouse.

And if you assume you are dull and boring and tell your kids nothing about yourselves, then your kids will call you boring. Because you will be.

Tell them stories about how you were nearly crushed to death by a tank transporter but were saved by a cup of tea, how the black market from the docks to the markets worked, what life was really like in a wartime mill town, what can happen when you volunteer for something during National Service, bomb disposal in Algiers, blowing up arms dumps in the desert (and accidentally taking out a tribe of passing nomads in the process), not being invited to your own mother's funeral, being ordered to steal 20 tonnes of anthracite, getting a story in the Liverpool papers about a doodlebug going off when actually it was you and your mates with a drum of carbide you'd 'found', suddenly walking out of work and going home and meeting your sister on the way there who is running home from school during classtime to get home and find your mum dead, how your ancestors come from a different part of the country from what you thought and your dad's family ended up north and down the pits by accident and shall I go on?

Admittedly our generation don't have the stories our parents had, but if you don't tell the ones you have, they're lost forever and your children lose something that should belong to them: who they are and where they come from.