I’m Starting To Get The Picture

I love my old movies. I love watching them over and over.

And by mid afternoon on New Years Day it finally looked like I was going to get to watch something I wanted on the telly. The kids had finally had their fill of Peppa Pig, Frozen and H2O.

Which was a good thing, because I’d had my fill of them months ago. Years ago, in the case of the newly rediscovered H2O.

But what to watch? Groundhog Day is always my first port of call when needing to relax off a hard night of ‘beer tasting’, but I thought I’d spice things up a bit so I dug behind the pile containing the likes of Rise Of The Guardians, Grease, The Lego Movie, Hairspray, Wreck It Ralph, Tangled, Toy Story and, I swear, every Dora DVD ever produced, to my private stash.

I pulled out some old telly favourites – Yes, Minister, Firefly and The Vicar of Dibley. Then some movies I love – Roman Holiday, Blade Runner, Con Air, Reservoir Dogs, The Shawshank Redemption, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Snatch, Forest Gump, The Fifth Element and Romancing The Stone.

Finally, I dug out a classic and I knew my search was over – When Harry Met Sally. I reckon I’ve seen this movie fifty or ninety times. I was already giggling over the karaoke scene (‘It’s my voice, isn’t it?’) as I slipped the disc into the Xbox.

I dragged a mattress out of the kids’ room and set myself up with a bottle of water and too many pillows. I was ready for a few hours of warm fuzzies, chuckles and, hopefully, a sizable nap in the air conditioning.

No, I wasn’t.

Because I have kids.

And they were all around me, playing with dolls and Lego and on various electronic devices.

Even as Meg and Billy set off on their eighteen hour road trip to New York I knew it wasn’t going to go to plan.

“Dad!” said Master9, lifting his head from the action on his DS. “That’s disgusting!”

“What’s disgusting?”

“They’re eating each other’s faces.”

“They’re kissing.”

“You don’t kiss Mum like that.”

“I do,” I assured him, “but you don’t see it.”

“Thankfully,” he said. “I’d puke.”

At this point part of me was wondering what he was going to think of Meg’s iconic, ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene.

But we didn’t get that far because the next thing you know the classification police were standing between me and the screen with their hands on their hips.

And no, it wasn’t Tracey.

“This movie is inappropriate around the little kids,” Miss11 told me in no uncertain terms, “because it keeps talking about s-e-x.”

Which was a bugger because that’s one of the things I like about it.

Then she removed the dvd and insisted I choose something more appropriate.

Which was how we ended up watching Frozen. Again. For only the second time this year. And there were still 364 days to go.

I really don’t know where they get this obsession with watching the same movies over and over again.

Oh, wait…

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“Raising a family on little more than laughs”