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Half-term giving parents lockdown flashbacks

THE half-term holiday is triggering the PTSD parents developed during last winter’s unbearable f**king lockdown, they have confirmed. 

Across the UK, parents are responding to requests from children to ‘make a rocket out of a Coke bottle like on YouTube’ by falling to their knees and clawing at the sky like Charlie Sheen in Platoon.

Mother-of-three Jo Kramer said: “I thought it was all behind me but a few days in the house and I’m back there, back in that eternal winter lockdown I never truly left.

“The screams of children fighting over an Xbox controller. The splatter of rain against the windows. The suffocating boredom. Walking purposefully upstairs to scream into a duvet.

“I knew it was all a dream; the vaccine, the opening up of society, the flowering of hope. Once you’ve slammed into cold, hard reality like I did those three months it never leaves you. Happiness is an illusion indulged in by the weak.

“They say ‘it’s only a few days’. Bollocks. Once again I’m a caged animal, circling my own offspring, wondering who will be the first to strike.”

Husband Andy Kramer said: “What’s that? I’ve been out at work. Hey, who fancies a jigsaw?”

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Bluey, and other kids' TV shows you're praying will make up for your inadequate parenting

HAVING children really is a lot of work. Someone should have warned you. But when your parenting skills fail here are some TV shows that will hopefully pick up the slack.

Bluey

A modern cartoon classic from Australia. The emphasis here is creativity, ‘play time’ and ‘make-believe’. Your kid might turn out a bit soft, but at least they’ll f**k off and invent their own bullshit games. Hopefully their imagination will become so developed they’ll think they’re playing with you, when actually you’re down the pub.

Peppa Pig

Watch more than five minutes of this and you’ll realise Peppa is a naughty little shit who’d do more good in a Sausage McMuffin than on TV. But it IS an accurate portrayal of family dynamics. She relentlessly bullies her younger brother George and exploits her stupid dad’s good nature while her downtrodden mum looks on smiling weakly. Very educational.

Sesame Street

Why teach your kids stuff when you’ve got the ‘72-inch LCD screen babysitter’? Plonk them in front of Count von Count – maths is the creepy vampire’s problem now. Who cares if they develop a New York accent? If they get lippy and start asking what species Big Bird is and that sort of thing, tell them Cookie Monster will bite their faces off in their sleep.

Grange Hill

At some stage your children will reach school age. Spoiler: they’ll hate it. Luckily 80s reruns of Grange Hill are hardcore: non-stop bullying, overt racism and Zammo off his tits on heroin. Stop their strops at breakfast and bleating about tests by claiming there’s a nearby school just like Grange Hill and you can always enrol them in that.

Pingu

By the time your kids grow up, the ice caps will be gone and many species extinct. So introduce them to nature while you can. Attenborough is a bit advanced, so start with a plasticine, stop-motion penguin who spends his entire life gorging on fish and going ‘noot noot’. The show also develops your child’s language skills when they suddenly say ‘Please, I’m begging you, can we change channels, Mummy?’

Mr Benn

It’s never too early for your kids to start learning about the world of work. In this 70s classic a man does a different job every day – the perfect representation of the gig economy! Of course, if it was made now, Mr Benn’s careers wouldn’t be knight or spaceman, they’d be Uber, Deliveroo and OnlyFans.

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