Voy Por Ustedes

So I'm looking out of my window this morning and it looks warm and sunny. It is of course in actuality, windy and cold. Damn you deceptive sun. Damn you. I commit to going outside though as I need a sandwich and one of those Wispa bars to bed down a craving that developed for them in the early hours.

My drive to the shops is halted however by a woman in a purple polo shirt standing in the middle of the road. She displays no obvious credentials giving her authority to stop traffic and I'm fixing to tell her so when I notice a party of little dudes waiting on the pavement and it becomes clear she's a Primary School teacher and is preparing to ferry her class across the road.

They have small legs so it takes a few moments for them to negotiate the distance but it gives me time to appraise the system she's employed with her two other colleagues in order to see the 15 strong class of wee ones safely across to the other side.

They're tethered together with elastic possibly nylon chord, which is fair enough, but she and her two colleagues, who are also females I hasten to add, have employed the standard boy-girl-boy-girl tethering system. This immediately sends horrendous memories of my own experiences with this deplorable system hurtling forward from the deepest darkest parts of my childhood to the present day.

Why do Primary school teachers impose this hell on the children whose safety and psychological development is entrusted to them? I know for a fact that boys hate this system cause I was one and I knew then as those poor boys know today, that girls of Primary school age have the "lurgy." It makes no difference that the dreaded lurgy is a fictitious infection, because the fear is very real and it's the fear we associate later in life with women in some circumstances.

I can't speak for girls, but I can see no obvious plus sides for them either. Whatever the reason, I don't doubt that those teachers are convinced it's a good idea, but if they would only stop for a moment to consider the long term implications of this system.

My research has proven that being tethered to a girl, especially a dorky girl with greasy hair and glasses who is prone to wetting herself without warning, can have long term psychological consequences for the boys involved. The most obvious being an almost phobic uneasiness with long term commitment in relationships in adult life.

Ask any single ostensibly normal man who isn't unreasonably repulsive why he has never married and the response will almost certainly be associated with a fear of being "tied-down" metaphorically speaking.

This is the subconscious fear of exposure to the "lurgy" carried by the girls they were literally tied to as children and since everything in the adult world is bigger and scarier than in infancy, "adult woman lurgy" becomes a terrifying enough prospect to keep measurable percentages of the male population in fear of marriage for their entire adult lives.

Their entire lives!