bah, bloody humbug, bugger off!

Listen, there's something you don't know about me.

I'm a childophobe.

I'm like the queen played by Anna Quayle in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" who's terrified of all the children in the kingdom, so has that horrifying child catcher on hand to catch them all and imprison them.

Except I don't have a child catcher.

So, instead, today has to be one of my scary mary days, hiding behind the sofa. Because it's All Saints' Day. Which means that it's a national holiday AND children do a similar thing to "trick or treating" (as well as having adopted bloody "trick or treating" for halloween so last night at 11.30pm I'm desperately trying to get my terrified little kids to sleep after some little bastards do their annual trick of stuffing a cocktail stick in my doorbell so that it rings and rings and rings) called "pão por Deus" (lit. bread for God, although it could also mean "Bread BY God"...like "Eternity by Calvin Klein" (how DID CALVIN ever become a cool name?))... which I believe (though I am sure to be corrected from the off... so look out for an erratum later!) was a custom in the villages which died out in the nineteen forties, only to be resurrected in the last few years by SOME zealous souls (teachers maybe?) keen on national folklore, unaware that it would inspire fear and loathing in many souls shut in their houses (er...me) afraid that they may get waterbombed by a bunch of ten year old thugs indulging in thuggery (though, thankfully, not twenty-year-old bugs indulging in....) because they don't have bucket loads of M&Ms to hand out (laced with arsenic) or those repulsive "bollycao" things that children are so fond of (with pins in) to hand out, and further promote a distinct lack of respect that modern children have for anything around here.

And now I have just found a note in my six-year-old thug's school book to say that she and her class will be doing a controlled ransacking of the village's old people and unemployed on Wednesday "to promote the continuity of our traditions and customs". *sigh* *double sigh*

Addendum. I am a childophobe. But I am not scared of my own children or children of my friends. Just to clarify. Before I get a torrent of emails saying how sad it is that a mother is scared of her own children and what is the world coming too when a woman can admit in an open blogosphere that her children are the work of the devil and all that and that maybe a child catcher (state funded, of course) might actually be a good idea... erm.