“You were in our PBE video,” my youngest said, when she got home from school. I find it hard to disaggregate the acronym lessons in the timetable, and tend to assume everything is PE. It struck me as unlikely, however, that I’d be in a PE video, so I dredged my brain and found “philosophy, beliefs and ethics”. Sure, that checks out. I have beliefs, a couple of ethics. I must have said them in a video at some point or other.
“I said you were my mum, and nobody believed me,” she continued, and I said: “Why? Are you known for making up weird lies?” And she said: “That too, but also, different surnames. Then, when the teacher believed me, she asked if you’d come in and talk to the class, and I said you’d probably like that but, from my point of view, absolutely no way.”
“What was I saying?” I asked, dragging her attention back to the video. She gave me an indulgent look. “I wasn’t listening.” And after that I thought no more about it.
But that was not the end of it. I started getting clips from friends whose kids are also in year nine. There’s my giant face, circa 2010 (I guess), talking about Big Ethics – the death penalty, abortion, voluntary euthanasia – as the voice of humanism. It’s not a formal doctrine, see; any of us can be its high priestess. The problem is, what I’m saying is wild. I was then, as now, against capital punishment, for reproductive self-determination, pro the right to die. So I don’t disagree with myself, but all my arguments start in a weird place: “The death penalty is wrong because all acts of violence have their roots in the early-life brutalisation of the perpetrator.” I mean: maybe? But not necessarily, and that’s not why it’s wrong. “Abortion is right because a foetus isn’t a baby – only a baby is a baby”: sure, but it’s a bit of a “Jackanory” way to put it.
Did my friends clip me in a peculiar way? Did the BBC? Was it just one of those days when I don’t make sense? Shame that this should be the day that makes it on to the school curriculum, at exactly the point my own offspring reaches it. But, on the bright side, she wasn’t listening.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
