‘Peppa! Peppa!’ my daughter cries. We are in a shopping centre, but we could just as easily be on a high street, at a petrol station, or on the tube. Right now, she has discovered an inflatable Peppa outside a gift shop in Dublin. They say a shark can detect one drop of blood in 100,000 litres of water. Well, last month my daughter ran 40m across a crowded motorway services to scream and point at a tiny Peppa colouring set on a high shelf. To walk anywhere with her is like padding around parliament with a sniffer dog. There is no escape for any book, toy, activity pack or magazine that sports that flattened pink hairdryer face and stick figure arms.
This preternatural skill does not appear to have any other applications. She displays little animal cunning or laser-guided focus in any other aspect of her life. This is, after all, a child who still boasts an irrepressible desire to eat Lego and rub Vaseline in her eyes.
But Peppa has become her first ‘thing’ and, it turns out, Peppa is everywhere. In a curious formulation of the Baader Meinhof Complex, to walk through life with a small child is to discover that this is Peppa’s world and the rest of us are mere temporary residents. Those streets you’ve walked down every day of your life have, all this time, been festooned in subliminal Peppa you’ll have never noticed until you do so accompanied by someone desperate for you to acquire them.
If we were to purchase every image of Peppa we encounter, we’d have to sell our kidneys to pay the rent. This means we spend a lot of time telling her ‘No’ and briskly walking her away. No. No. No Peppa. To offset this, we do have three cuddly Peppas in heavy rotation and, at the risk of hyperbole, I reckon they are the greatest development in childcare since we stopped sending kids down mines.
She has a big Peppa (bought from a shop purely because she’d pulled it down from a table and drenched it in her own snot), a medium Peppa that sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and a small Peppa, whom she considers her baby and carries in her arms for most of the day. I say most of the day, because she’s also taken to placing baby Peppa in a small pink pram and pushing it around our house.
Baby Peppa has, thus, become a conduit through which my daughter enacts a cruel satire of the adult world. She rocks baby Peppa to sleep and strokes her head with vigorous smacks of her pudgy little hands. She puts her down to bed – any flat surface – and shushes her by putting a finger to her lips. She hands her fistfuls of pasta at meal times and says, ‘Uh oh,’ when they fall from her pesto-smeared snout.
And, standing in a shopping centre in Dublin, staring at an inflatable cartoon pig, she makes Peppa point at the display, as if imploring her infant mother to buy for her an image in her own likeness. ‘No,’ my daughter replies, sternly, walking briskly on.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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