“A number of children kept coming over to the tennis courts, rattling on the gate, and trying to get in. The watching middle-class mums did nothing to restrain them. Eventually my friend yelled, “Go AWAY!” Whereupon the watching mums did do something. A mob of them descended on us as though my friend had exposed himself. Suddenly we were in the midst of a maternal zombie film. It was the nearest I’ve ever come to getting lynched—they were after my friend rather than me and though, strictly speaking, I was his opponent, I was a tacit accomplice—and a clear demonstration that the rights of parents and their children to do whatever they please have priority over everyone else’s. “A child is the very devil,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a letter, “calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents.”
Quote by Geoff Dyer
Work
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids
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Author
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is a British writer known for his distinctive travel literature and essays. His works often use travel as a backdrop to explore themes of personal identity, cultural differences, and memory. more
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