Save it for later

Elder daughter sidled up to me in the kitchen last week and inquired, sotto voce: "How did you do it?"

We've been struggling over the past few weeks with younger daughter's descent to the breakfast table. The descent has been occurring later and later, until she was missing breakfast more often than not and worse, making her lift idle in the bus stop in front of our house. Our lives for the past half-dozen years have run on the theme of "Is it adolescence or autism?", so any attempts to reason with her were loudly rebuffed.

Finally, I remembered reading somewhere that writing is not nagging, so I wrote her a letter detailing the problem and making some suggestions, leaving it on her bed. We did hear an indignant "How dare they?" from behind her closed door, but, wonder of wonders, she has been down to eat breakfast in plenty of time for a week and a half.

This means, among other things, that we also have plenty of time to listen to the radio before she leaves. This was playing this morning:

I don't remember The Beat (known as the English Beat outside of England), although I do recall General Public, their next incarnation. Cute though, isn't it? The Beat in a fifties beat club which still manages to look thoroughly eighties. Maybe it's the hair.

While we're at it, here's Pete Townsend doing an acoustic version some years later:

Townsend offers a prize for anyone who can tell him what the song means. There's an unsavoury theory that the title and chorus are a play on words. I really hope they aren't.