I’m very proud of my eldest daughter. This little interlude in paternal conceit harks back to an earlier blog post about dumb arseholes on the road, and also previous armchair philosophising about the slow improvement to humanity that will come when each successive generation is just a little bit embarrassed by and disdainful of the manners and beliefs of the one before.

I can armchair philosophise on my blog now, thanks to the hit-and-miss (but-usually-hit) charms of the webomophone and its ability to blog, without the need to drag an armchair in front of my computer.

While I tend to think I’m a pretty nice guy, open-minded about all the right things, non-violent in my objection to the things it’s pretty much still acceptable to hate on (stupidity, ignorance, bigotry, very famous people who take drugs), and so on, I’m also happy to accept that, some day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be considered a dinosaur. My views will be corny at best, embarrassing and distasteful at worst. I’ll be the ageing relative at Christmas who has one too many vodka-enhanced glögis and says something hideously thoughtless and hilariously brutal about making people pass a test before they’re allowed to breed, or exiling all very famous people to vast caverns far below the ground to become Morlocks.

Actually, I may already be that relative.

Still, my point is, I’m fine with this, and fine with the criticisms the younger generation will level at me. Oh, I’m sure that I can’t forsee all the twists and turns. I’m sure they’ll hurt my feelings, and I’ll huffily defend my old-fashioned views and grumble about how wimpy and sensitive kids these days are. But hopefully I’ll always be able to keep in mind that this is all part of the greater good, that as long as kids these days are objecting to certain of my views, things are steadily getting better.

So anyway, the other day I was out doing some grocery shopping with Young Miss, and we were making our way home – Young Miss in the pram with her ice cream[1], I’m pushing her with a heavy bag of groceries on each handle – when who should drive by but a moran.

[1] Young Miss has been a little sensitive these past few days, naturally, so to make the trip go easier I gave in to her demand for ice cream, weird though it was in early March. Still, it kept her happy, and gave me a handy item to threaten to put back in the freezer if she made a jerk of herself before we finished our shopping. But she didn’t.

This particular moran was the driving-too-fast-and-changing-lanes-across-slush-piles variety, and Young Miss ended up wearing most of the slush across her face and ice cream, and in her eyes. She was understandably upset, and I was furious.

“Just as well that shit-for-brains didn’t stop,” I told her as I cleaned her up, “I’d’ve kicked him in the testicles.”

“But papa,” she said, “one[2] can’t kick a person in the testicles.”

[2] She actually said, “man can’t kick a person in the testicles,” man being Swedish for the one impersonal pronoun – you can tell from the pronunciation that she’s not saying the English man. She’s used this term almost from the start to refer to cases where only the more unwieldy and hard-to-master one would work in English.

I had to concur that she was right, one couldn’t just kick someone in the testicles for being a moran, even if I would very much like to. And given that I wouldn’t have done so, even if the moran had stopped, it was wrong for me to say it anyway. Call it my forgiving nature, my dislike of confrontation, or me just being a wimp. One can’t kick a person in the testicles.

But for my daughter, three and a half years old and sprayed in the eyes with slush while eating an ice cream, to voice such a sentiment … yes.

We’re getting better.