The crazy world of blue cards

I AM getting a blue card.

It will prove that it’s safe to let me loose among children.

Which is not necessarily true. It depends on the child. It’s reasonably safe to take me off my leash around good children. I generally eat the other kind, eventually. It’s a very effective method of child-control, once word gets round.

I don’t bother with naughty spots, or reasoning, I just say no – and they stop.

This may, of course, prove to be an impediment to getting a blue card. Who can tell? The world’s gone mad.

This is all happening because my wife is about to open a family day-care service at our house.

This means she’ll be earning $5 an hour each for a maximum of four children, which will make her maximum earnings $20 an hour.

To do this my wife, a retired nursery nurse, needs a blue card, which will be proof to the world that children are safe with her.

But that’s not enough. I have to have one, too. And my daughter, because she spends a lot of time at our house. And probably the dog.

But I don’t want children to be safe with me. I want to be a risk so awful that they’ll lock me in my study and not let me out except when it’s time to go to the pub.

And this is not because I don’t like children, let me stress. I love children. I have five, and a few grandchildren. I think they love me.

This is my protest at the sad, mad state we’ve got ourselves into.

My own father is dead, and that’s a good thing. He worked in a clothes shop in the centre of the town where he lived and lots of kids came in with their parents to buy school uniforms. He knew hundreds of children. They used to ambush him on his way home from work and he’d hand out pencils (I think he stole them from work) and sweets. If he saw a child with a grazed knee he’d kneel down to help, and wrap his handkerchief round it to stop the bleeding. If he saw one lost in a store he’d pick it up and go find its parents.

Which is why it’s a good job he’s dead, because if he wasn’t dead he’d be in jail.

Unless he had blue card, of course.

You only need them, of course, if you’re working in some official capacity around children. If you just happen to a friendly old man from a different time you just get beaten to death by paranoid parents.

But what about babysitters? Do they need blue cards? What about when Mary goes for a sleepover with Jane (or, much more likely in this weird world – when Shivani Sunshine goes for a sleepover with Frangipani Blossom)?

Who’s monitoring our friends… even our relatives. I mean, you can’t trust anyone anymore.

And there’s the problem.

(Actually, there’s another problem, which is how it can possibly be that we pay the electrician $80 an hour, the plumber $70, our masseurs $60 – but the people who look after our children, $5, but that’s another story).

The really sad part is that we don’t trust anyone any more. They’re going to steal our handbag, or our car, or our children, or our TV, or our business.

It’s a shame. We used to live in streets with neighbours who had lived there longer than us. No one stole anything because you’d see it on their mantelpiece if they did.

And kids stayed away from the strange bloke at number 7, because well… he was strange, and it was best to be cautious.

You just knew, because you’d known the family a long time. Now neighbours are people you see leaving their garage when they go to work, and entering again when they come home. If you can be really certain it’s not going to lead to any long-term familiarity, you might nod at them.

We don’t know them and, I suspect, we don’t want to know them, which is worse.

Maybe we should carry a new wallet of new cards: red ones to prove we’re not terrorists, green ones to prove we’re not thieves, purple ones to prove we’re not drug peddlars.

All I’ve got to say is, bah! I’m going to my study. I suggest you keep the children away from me. And if one should wander past, make it a tasty one.