We went to the pantomime a couple of days ago … Hope’s cousins were visiting with my brother, so we had a family trip. Hope had to have her own seat, she sat in it very proudly for all of 15 minutes and the interval, then spent the rest of the performance on my lap.
She sat bolt upright, and watched intently. She clapped, she danced, she cheered, she boo’d, she even shouted “behind you” (her cousins had trained her for that), and she kept turning round and beaming at me. “Happy Hope”.
They sang a song about a buzzy bee which she’s been singing to herself ever since, and during the ensemble dances she wriggled her shoulders and did all the arm movements the girls on stage were doing.
During the interval, Hope sat with exactly the same intensity as her precious Granby, and ate an ice cream, mouthful by careful mouthful of my tub of ice cream, eaten with a tiny spoon we found in the lid of the tub. At the end she put the spoon back in the tub, carefully replaced the lid, handed it all to me and said, “Yummy isssreeeeeeemmmm”.
She got a little bored in the love scene between Robin Hood and Maid Marion so she demanded milky (yet another occasion I was so glad we’re still breastfeeding), and after that she happily stood in the empty row behind us and patted each of her cousins and her uncle before kissing her Granby and coming back to me.
The panto was building, in the time honoured format to the thrilling conclusion, when all of a sudden, the baddie, the nasty Sheriff of Nottingham bounded across the stage talking about how sexy he was. My prudish side did wonder about the amount of sexual innuendo in the panto but I guess that’s also par for the course.
The bad guy carried on flexing his muscles and Hope yawned and turned to me for more milky, just at the right time it transpired. In trying to prove his macho badness, the Sheriff had one of his minions bring on Peppa Pig … after ritually humiliating the pink piglet, the Sheriff took his sword, raised it high and bought it down sharply, severing the poor hog’s head. Thank Goodness Hope was looking in the other direction.
She would be in need of therapy by now if she had witnessed Peppa’s execution … I’m not far off myself … and just before Christmas.
She isn’t a TV child at all, someone gave her a tiny Peppa figurine which she loves, and she had a Christmas card from one of her little friends with the pig depicted on the front … just those two things have led to a minor Peppa Pig obsession…. and after what happened when she saw poor Tom (from Tom and Jerry) being tortured when she was put in front of the Cartoon Network by some well meaning friends, I think the onstage decapitation of her porcine buddy would have been too much for her to cope with.
All in all it was a great evening, and she has sung the songs ever since and I catch her trying to replicate the dance routines sometimes infront of the Christmas Tree… but seriously, did they have to decapitate Peppa Pig … at a children’s panto?
Really? Was it entirely necessary? They’ll be burning effigies of Barbar the Elephant and BagPuss next … come on panto people lighten up.
Right then, time to go and start wrapping her presents and to recover from the trauma of reliving the death of one of Hope’s heroines.
