Big Babies - 1

I have just finished reading the book, Big Babies by Michael Bywater...A Cambridge lecturer, writer and literary critic. A interesting book, which unlike the majority of books I read, actually had me laughing...and more than once. This is not so much a grumpy old rant, as one reviewer commented, but a cultural lament at the slow degredation of our culture and society. Bywater is a modern day prophet pleading with a generation to wake up and grow up.

I will leave you with a short quote in which Bywater draws our attention to how signs-which-point-out-the-obvious, infantilise us and make us essentially 'Big Babies.' It had me laughing for quite a while, yet at the same time strangely awake to every plastic and metal sign (and there are alot...an awful lot) as I continued my day.

''It strikes you as out of kilter that there's a notice at London Paddington station which says 'please be ready to may with your luggage when you reach the top of escalator' becuase it implies that otherwise you wouldn't be ready to move away with your luggage but, instead would stand there like a moron with other morons piling up against you so that eventually something has to give and you all tumble back down the escalator in melee of morons and get sucked into the mechanism and ground to hamburger and they'd hose the down and scrub the gobbets of stupid flesh out of the machinery and start it up again and the same thing would happen again...or, if not, why the need for the notice.''