Your child is ugly!

Of course I don’t mean that! Or do I?

We’ve all thought it when looking through somebody’s collection of snaps of their offspring. All babies are cute, they are babies, helpless bundles of cuteness. They gurgle and smell of talcum powder (mostly). They get wind and we capture a ‘smile’. They puke and shit themselves (not so cute then). They are babies, babies are cute.

OK we’ve established the fact babies=cute, mostly. And of course the cutest babies of them all are our own.
It follows on, when we look in the mirror in the morning none of us say “oh boy don’t I look ugly!”. I know I’m no oil painting, but I don’t consider myself ugly. Some people may beg to differ, like the old proverb says, “Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder” or something like that.


Up until a few years ago the only time you got to see pictures of other peoples children was a) if you were a member of their family or very close friend b) in a school class photo c) in the newspaper.

Now of course with the combined evils of digital camera phones and social media web sites, proud parents can put their little angels up for the world and his wife to see. Yes, yes, that’s all very good, you want the world to see that you can reproduce. But do you have to share every waking moment of the dear child’s day on your time line.

“Here’s Johnny picking his nose …. aww so cute” “Here Anabel sicking up her brekkie”. We don’t need to see it. Keep them on your phone or download them to somewhere private so in years to come you can embarrass the little cherub when he/she bring home their first date.

But it doesn’t stop there ….. oh no, not satisfied in digitally documenting a child’s life on some social media cloud, we now have to endure the “Night Out With The Girl/Lads” photo sessions. Again armed with the trusty mobile phone endless imagines appear on the net of groups of otherwise quite respectable individual posing under the drunken apprehension that they are the “in crowd”, complete with trout pouts and inappropriate gang signs.

It also appears, judging by some of the photos I’ve seen, that young (and some not so young) ladies feel the need to show off next week’s laundry. Let’s be honest most of these evening out photo collections would not be complete without at least one upskirt shot as the “lady” in question tries to stop the room from spinning by having her leg akimbo.

Your artistic aptitude goes out the window when drunkenly trying to hold your phone at arms length while tickling some random strangers tonsils with your tongue. The resulting blurred, smudge of colour with notably more limbs than people may look good on your iPhoney but when uploaded to Facebook just serves to remind others what a drunk mess you have become.

Remember one day, your cute little baby may have a Facebook account of their own, and it will be payback time.

There is a way when posting pictures to Facebook to limit who see these images. Use it, please, and limit to yourself.

I could go on, but instead I’m off to comment on random baby pictures “Oh look he’s got his fathers shifty eyes. Hope he doesn’t grow up to be a serial criminal too”

Say cheese!

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