Keeping Tabs

Well, Jimminy Cricket, too busy to look after yer kid?  Isn't that, after all, an absolute necessity? 

To keep tabs on three young children wouldn't seem too heavy a burden for two people.  Many parents do just that, and do it extremely well.  They've got it together, as it happens, assigning top priority to that task; knowing where their children are, ensuring that when they're out in public they're close by.  And most obviously, remembering to include them when you return home.

That caution first and foremost in every parent's mind.  Always lurking deep in the subconscious of the attentive, supporting and loving parent is the horror of possibly forgetting about a child, somehow managing to leave the child behind.  And, then, it happens, and terror sets in, fear of the potential of the unknown occurring, and that child never being seen alive again. 

As for the child him/herself, finding themselves abandoned - for let's face it, as far as a child is concerned that is abandonment - that kind of trauma can mark the child for life.  Trust the parent again?  Not bloody likely.  Begin clinging to the parents, fearful of independence, losing the sensation of curiosity and adventure?  Likely enough. 

So was this an state affair the parents were attending, where their attention was focused elsewhere than on the children?  For this was, after all, none other than British Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha who more or less lost track of their eight-year-old daughter, Nancy.  Each assuming, naturally enough, that the other was looking to her welfare.

They'd gone on a family outing of a Sunday, visiting a country pub.  Kids in a pub, egad!  Well, this is Britain, after all, indoctrinate them early.  Let's just hope that little Nancy hadn't visited the washroom because her bladder got all sudsy.  But there it was, she had gone to the bathroom and the parents decided it was time to return home.  Mother scooped up the other two, and no one noticed Nancy wasn't with them.

While she was in the washroom, Prime Minister Cameron got in one vehicle with his bodyguards, and his wife assumed her place in another vehicle with the other two children.  And off they drove.  No one in either vehicle noticing the absence of the child.  Until they disembarked.  To discover one of the brood not in attendance. 

Whereupon they called The Plough and there she still was.

"They are their children and they take responsibility for them.  No one is going to face disciplinary action.  This was an error", said a spokeswoman stoutly.  In defence of the non-attention on the part of the bodyguards.  But who is prepared to defend the parents? 

And let's face it, if two people cannot take charge of three young children and do it properly, is one of them truly capable of looking to the well-being of a nation?

Well, obviously he must have brooded on this, hoping that no one would notice, and as time went by no one seemed to.  And then Mr. Cameron took the initiative to have his government set up a program for parents of young children to learn in classes specially for that purpose, how to raise them.  Safely.