Cut to the Car Chase

My children’s current obsession with law and order, (cops and robbers being the favourite game of the moment) has recently extended to encompass the school run. To my recipe for a South African country school run post of a few months ago, I can now add a new ingredient. Every white car (and in South Africa 50% of cars are white) is a police car and every other car is a robber. Our car is silver grey,(encrusted with red clay mud from our road), so we are robbers escaping from the police. This calls for much screeching and ducking down in the back, whenever a white car pursues us... sighs of relief, when we escape undetected and they pass us by. I am Robber Mum, they are Robber Children going to Robber School. Their teacher has a white car...but that’s OK cos she stole it from the police and she is really Robber Teacher!

Interestingly enough, a real police car causes far less excitement than a plain white car – maybe the reality doesn’t quite fit with the fantasy life of inverted justice, the robbers being the good guys – bad is good, good is bad. Reminds me of another favourite game, (luckily now losing ground to terrible Knock Knock jokes), where Yes means No and No means Yes, You can get horribly tied up in knots with that one. I hope this tendency to turn the world on its head and look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars is a normal part of moral development and experimentation for young children and not a sign indicating an urgent need for a child psychologist!