Competing children

The thing five-year-olds most dread on their first day at school, according to Child of Our Time (BBC1, Tuesday), is using the dirty, smelly, alien toilets. I remember the moment well. Peeing in the urinal all men quickly learn to dread — the middle one — I was mortified to notice that the two boys either side of me were pissing themselves laughing. ‘He doesn’t know how to use his flies,’ said one boy to the other. And I didn’t. Mummy hadn’t shown me. Instead, I had dropped my trousers round my ankles, just as I did at home. But cosy homeworld, I suddenly came to realise, no longer counted for very much. From now on, I would have to inhabit a cruel, arbitrary universe where the rules were decided by people other than one’s delightfully biased, doting mummy. It was a shock from which I have never recovered.

Being as Child of Our Time is all about children, I should imagine it’s of no interest whatsoever to people who aren’t parents.