Minus One

I came down the stairs on the bus the other day - Edinburgh buses feel safer than Yorkshire buses, which means I'm able to sit upstairs without the awful apprehension that used to plague me about descending them and falling to my ultimate demise. So I came down the stairs and saw a woman with a sleeping baby in a sling coming towards the door, so obviously I let her go first. Off she got and I followed. Then I realised that what I thought was a baby aged around a year was in fact a twenty five year old woman. Yes, that's right. A mother. Carrying her twenty five year old child. In a sling.

As the above photograph suggests, the mother had a severe spinal deformity, probably due to the fact she's been carrying a 25 year old around in a sling.

The 25 year old was asleep and looked thoroughly contented. That might have something to do with the fact she'd never been forced to use her completely non-disabled legs to do any walking because her mother is quite happy to tote her around like a great big teddy bear.

Let's bear in mind here, that it was around half past 4 in the evening. The 25 year old clearly had no kind of a routine and would no doubt be awake until the early hours of the morning, during which time, the deformed mother would stand, staring into space (because she cant straighten her back into an upright position) wondering why her child wasn't asleep.

Get a grip, middle-class parents! Your children need to walk sometimes. They also need to learn to hate you for depriving them of their sleep. I am hereby pioneering a new campaign to get middle-class children walking:

To join my campaign, you just have to sponsor a spine. It could be your own, it could be mine, it could be the spine of a seasoned hooker, it really doesn't matter so long as you're willing to pay it a pound a week and stroke it a little bit sometimes. That's basically it.

So off you go! Find your spines! LOVE YOUR SPINES!