Fimbles, Wombles and Other Creatures of Habit...

You probably thought that 50,000 episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine was about as bad as it got. If you’ve trodden the path where I’ve been, you may well be at that ‘numb’ stage with the Numberjacks. This is when your brain makes a brave attempt at survival by actually blocking out the background noise entirely, so that you can’t even hear it any more. 

It became rather obvious to me that this was how I’d maintained sanity for nine years when Alec was waiting to see the paediatrician for his annual check-up. 

Beforehand in the waiting room, he had taken quite a liking to a Disney mirror that told him he was a beautiful princess. He pressed it more than a dozen times and put it up to his ear. By the second dozen, this was floating nicely over my head until I suddenly realised that it could be driving the other parents to distraction. I removed it from him and replaced it with something else (Alec is remarkably easy going in this respect) and there was a palpable collective sigh of relief.

Alec is back into The Fimbles at the moment. We’ve got beyond the ironic joke stage with this and I’m harbouring ever more murderous thoughts about Fimbo as time goes on. I'm even starting to hope that he chokes on a Crumble Cracker, which is uncharacteristically voilent. I can see that the technicolour magic of The Fimbles is what appeals to Alec, but the phrase 'everything in moderation' doesn't seem to apply to autistic kids. Their ethos is more 'everything to the Nth degree and then some'.

Meanwhile, Bobby’s tastes are changing in line with his peers. The stuff that entertains him is even more  annoying than The Fimbles. He feels a frightening connection with The Annoying Orange, a Cartoon Network programme. We don’t have the Cartoon Network, but Bobby has hunted down the most irritating programme on it anyway. He follows its website instead.

The Annoying Orange has a sick fixation with other fruit meeting their untimely end in a blender. It’s murder, but it’s fruit. Should I be okay with this? I'm not sure. I've never wished death on a strawberry. 

Calling the Annoying Orange ‘annoying’ doesn’t even come close. Bobby loves to repeat all the Annoying Orange’s ‘jokes’ plus its maddening cackle. Although this is a form of echolalia, repeated purely for his own pleasure, we are still expected to provide the correct social response by finding it hilarious. If I don’t, he taps me on the arm and does it again. I have tried to explain that the Annoying Orange really isn't my 'cup of tea', but of course all the food metaphors start to get a bit confusing.

Between The Fimbles and The Annoying Orange life can be a little stressful. Even Thomas the Tank Engine, with his frankly predictable storylines (that's the point) concerning pride coming before a fall, has lost his gleam.

Thank goodness then, for The Wombles, Morph, Paddington and The Clangers, where I can harp back to my youth and the days when kids' programmes were made with adults in mind. It doesn't matter how old I get, I'll never tire of the Soup Dragon.