The Evil Child

By now K, my eleven going on eighteen year old, is reasonably well known to you. You've heard about her antics, her liking for My Chemical Romance and similar and you know all about her advanced negotiating skills. As do I.

You'd think that I'd be ready for her to pounce at any time. A bit like Kato against Clousseau, that I'd lie in hiding in a permanent state of alert in case she attacks. That I'd be be ready for her to metaphorically jump out of a cupboard and Karate chop my head off. In fact in many ways I wish I was ready, but that would take away the element of suprise, which is fun in an "oh God what's she done now?" sort of way.

Picture the situation. I was chilling at home, having bought some new jeans and a couple of polo shirts in Kingston. In a slightly girly way I was apprehensive about buying the polo shirts but they were from Gap and the little bit of writing made me err on the side of spending the money. It said:

"Made in Sri Lanka"

I'm weak like that.

So I'd got home and was looking at the blog, publishing a few comments and browsing through some new books I'd bought. For a while I've had a Mac version of MS Office on my Macbook but haven't installed the MSN Messenger part of it. I bought the software to use Excel and Word and it came with an MSN thing. I've no real desire to begin my MSNing but there is one motivator.

K spends a lot of time on it, as do most of her friends. For some reason A, the thirteen year old, isn't that interested but K is to be seen most nights chatting away to her heart's content. Her Mother and I both try to police this activity as much as possible but it's an ongoing battle to decide where to draw the line between security and letting them do what all their friends do. A battle that I'm sure other parents have all the time, just ask Dinidu's Mum.

I know that joining up won't help a huge amount but I had thought that I'd sign up to MSN and make K a friend, so I could have a bit of an eye on what she's talking about, without prying too much. Sunday afternoon with a bit of spare time saw me installing MSN, staring at my Macbook and wondering what the fuck was going on, a normal occurrence when I install anything on anything.

Then, once the installation was done, I attempted to make K a friend, my only one. I quickly found out that this wasn't as simple as I had hoped. It involved some kind of email going in her direction and me asking her for friendship. You can imagine my trepidation. Putting K in a position of power is asking for trouble. A bit like putting your brother in charge of defence, you know it's going to cause problems but you just don't know the exact nature of them.

Well my problems came back to me within half an hour in the form of this email:

Dearest Father,

I am afraid I declined you on msn I told you I wouldn't accept you so I haven't! Mwuhahaha

Well I accepted then deleted you... Bye Bye

From

Evil Child x

There was a smiley in there somewhere but it hasn't come out when I copied and pasted.

Need I say more?