Of thimbles and things

Not of Fimbles thankfully. I cannot stand those stripey CBBC characters, the most offensively striped in pink and green.

Pink and green, I tell you!

The voicing of Bessie bird makes me feel quite nauseous ... coupled with an unseemly rage. Roly Mo troubles me not, I even approve of him to some extent with his love of his library - but his colleagues, the Fimbles I loathe. I can even tolerate his companion being a rather vile mixture of pinks and purples.

It is all Bessie bird's fault, however. Everything. I cannot think of anything I couldn't somehow twist and lay at the feet of that patronisingly syrupy bird. Foul cretinous creature, mired in her own smugness.

Evil bird (look at those beady eyes! too close together!) and hench-chick

I can handle Teletubbies, Tweenies and other tortuous creations, but the ones I find difficult not to leap through the screen like a deranged fiend from Derangedfiendland (popular holiday destination of the rich and famous) and strangle bare-handed are the Fimbles, the Hoobs and ghastly Rosie & Jim.

Barney the purple-headed dinosaur I would hate more, but fortunately my children have too much taste to bother with him.

It's not that I am severely intolerant when it comes to children's programming (I don't think) - I'm quite open-minded really. Unnecessarily and frighteningly jolly Hi-5 people escape my wrath, while Brum, Lazytown and Channel 5's Milkshake presenters do not make me want to throttle myself with my own tongue. I even occasionally consider adding the Wiggles to our ridiculously large library of children's brain-mushers. I flirt with the idea, you might say, but the idea of flirting with Wiggles is seriously worrying, I mean seriously seriously worrying, and if you are considering such activity, you might first want to check yourself into a place with lovely soft padded walls.

I completely lost the thread of what I intended to talk about here, which was in fact, how useful thimbles turn out to be. I had never realised that sewing can hurt so much, until I had to sew six badges onto my daughter's Brownie sash. Owowow. The material of both badge and sash is tough, tougher than my pretty little soft non-working digits. Fortunately there were thimbles in the house, which unlike fecking Fimbles turned out to be incredibly pain-saving.

It's just a subtle (or not so subtle) way of boasting about my girl's new badges really, this post, if you haven't figured it out yet.

I may talk about her swearing to serve her god, her queen and her country (ahem) when she was enrolled, another time.