With age comes wisdom ... and an insatiable appetite for violent retribution
I was hit as a child and it didn't do me any harm. In fact, I often feel I wasn't hit enough.
A few more beatings would perhaps have ironed out my faults. My sunny disposition for one. That really annoys people.
Perhaps I can sue my mother for failing to beat me long and hard enough. Her clips round my lug lacked the zip to really curb the excesses that later blighted my life.
Had Ma Ord delivered a more fearsome slap to my backside for example, I may, among other shortcomings, have learned to put the toilet seat down after use.
Do I have a case? Child neglect perhaps. "She neglected to slap me hard enough," m'lud. Maybe this is one for the European Court of Human Rights, I'm sure some lawyer will take it up.
Punishing children is a big deal in our house. Punishing our own children I hasten to add. I don't mind other kids misbehaving, they make ours look better, but they have to go some to do that at the moment.
Our Isaac, five, is particularly troublesome. I walked in from work the other day to be confronted by mayhem, with Isaac demanding I "phone the police and arrest mummy."
I was straight onto the 999 emergency operator. "Which service do I require? The police ... and hurry, my wife has asked our child to stop throwing cushions and beating his brother with a plastic T-Rex. Please be quick, I think she's going to ask him to go to his bedroom next."
Threats rarely work, so the punishments have to be real. Well, real-ish. The naughty step is old hat - he now gets sin-binned in our car in the drive. His loss of liberty, however, isn't enough.
Despite being put in the car after his police demands failed to be met, he refused to calm down. I threatened to chuck one of his Easter eggs in the bin. No reaction. So I marched into the house (secretly removed the chocolate egg from the box) and demonstratively dumped the egg box in the bin. He couldn't believe it.
"And until you calm down," I told him. "I will throw one of your eggs in the bin every five minutes. And I mean it."
He looked at me, tears streaming down his face, and shouted: "I'm going to break your heart."
And I've no doubt he will.
The amusing footnote to this argument is that my wife rang me at work the following day to tell me she overheard our two boys discussing the incident. Rather than being shocked at my tough stance, Isaac was heard to say that he reckoned there's no way I'd have chucked his egg in the bin, and that I would have returned later to put it back. He knows me too well.
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So who do you turn to for advice when it comes to punishment for crimes? Well I would stay clear of the over-60s.
With age comes wisdom … and, judging by a couple Echo articles this week, comes a taste for violent retribution.
In one letter from a reader concerned with the destruction of the Holy Cross at Tunstall there was no turning of the other cheek should we catch the culprits.
"Put them in the stocks at the entrance to the Bridges," raged Disgusted OAP on the Echo letters page. "And let God and the people of Sunderland decide their fate."
Bit strong perhaps, but there was an odd reasoning behind this measure. "It would," Disgusted argued, "dispense with the term in law where the name of a defendant cannot be reported due to them being underage." A bonus perhaps? Not really, as Disgusted points out "The whole of Sunderland will know their identity."
And what of the garden furniture thieves who struck at Maple Lodge Care Home, in Witherwack? Would they get a sympathetic hearing from the elderly?
Alice Sinclair, 80, a resident at the home looks sweet enough: "I think the people who did it should have their hands chopped off," she said. Crikey! What do they put in that cocoa?
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Noisy sex neighbour Caroline Cartwright was in the news after her sex sessions made life a misery for residents in Hall Road, Concord. She was fined 200.
It was revealed to one of our reporters that she and her husband Steve had sex every day of their married life. A fine is not enough in my opinion. Surely some sort of medal is in order.
A fine may seem a bit stiff, but she and Steve can take solace in the fact that Alice Sinclair wasn't one of their neighbours. Who knows what she'd have wanted chopped off as punishment.
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Police hunting the copper thieves who cut through power cables in Pallion on Monday have issued a photo of a man they want to question.
He is described as between 5ft 6 and 5ft 8ins tall, of medium build, with a startled face, hair standing on end and smoke billowing from his ears.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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