Dirty tramps get sprung

There are many, many reasons why being a kid today is palpably more shit than it was in my day, or in your day, or in your old man's day, or in pretty much any day you could name that wasn't the Industrial Revolution when being a kid largely involved being sent down t' pit for tuppence a millennia with nowt to eat but a cup of cold sick with a pube in it and when we came home after 25 1/2 hour shift to hole in t' road with wet newspaper over't we had to lick road clean wi' tongue and our Dad would thrash us to death with a broken bottle etc etc etc.

That minor discomfort aside, being a kid now sucks more than at any stage in the past fifty years. Because people are always THINKING about you. 'Oh won't somebody think of the children?' will howl a veritable battalion of pious screeching mavens, and yet that's all people - punishing, straightening, gimlet-eyed anti-fun people - seem to be able to do. Kids these days might get iPods and designer smack but they also have to put up with milquetoast bullshit the likes of which had never even been heard of ten years ago. Time out. Naughty steps. Peanut allergies. Jesus Christ, whatever happened to sorting out your differences behind the bike shed and still having time to get in a quick game of backyard tackle footy before Mum saw the state of your school gear and kicked your arse from here to Christmas.

Eventually, though, things reach a tipping point. Eventually, society reaches a Rubicon, a point beyond which there can be no turning back.

People of the World (of Bollocks), we have reached that sorry, sick day. We have reached that point of no return. And it is called Springfree™.


Designed by gimlet-eyed God-bothering Cantab fun police, Springfree claims to be the world's first springless trampoline, and as such, the world's first completely safe trampoline. No rusty springs, no rotting eyelet hooks, no exposed bare steel frame. Netting to catch the offspring before they spring off. Padding on every available surface. In short, no possible way for your darling little angels to hurt themselves in any way, lest they take in the Nerf bats and try to go each other UFC styles.

I think you can see where I'm going here.

WHAT

THE FUCK

IS THE

FUCKING

POINT

OF THAT.

This thing absolutely fucking horrifies me on multiple levels, two of which I'd like to shout at you about here. The first is the most obvious, to me at least. And it's a serious point. If kids can't hurt themselves, how the hell are they meant to learn what's safe and what's not?

Busted, rusted, verging-on-collapse trampolines - of which there was one in every Australian backyard by some form of legislative writ possibly dating back to Hawkey's first term, or maybe even No Pants Fraser - taught the nation's youngsters a lot of very valuable lessons. Primarily about risk assessment, hazard mitigation and accident avoidance. Just as sure as you knew not to ride your bike off stormwater drains because it'd cause you significant injury, or into the surf at the beach because your dad would, you knew, because you learned pretty quickly, what not to do on a trampoline. You KNEW not to bounce on the sides because you'd fly off into the paperbark trees. You KNEW to stay away from the springs, because down that path lay significant groinal trauma, and detaching one's prepubescent scrotum from a partially distended trampoline spring is not an experience that one should need to take into adolescence with them. You KNEW to stop doing drop-in bombs off the overhanging tree-branch after reaching your teens because touching down on the bricks underneath is not the kind of surprise your kidneys like to have. You KNEW not to look up the dress of your older cousin's cute best friend when she came over for a bounce during Xmas hols, because you'd get slapped, regardless of whether it was totally worth it or not, which it was. And you KNEW not to double-bounce your little brother into the stratosphere such that on his return to Earth he plummetted into the frame head-first, because claret would ensue, and you'd inevitably get unfairly blamed for his lack of spatial awareness, and/or consciousness.

In short, you knew how to identify hazards in your environment - like your parents, after pitching your bro into the undergrowth - and mitigate them - by running the fuck away and hiding at your mate's place. How the hell are kids going to get that sort of real-life training with this confection of unmitigated arse? Make no mistake, people, Springfree is child abuse. It's sending your children out into the world without the proper training, instruction or experience to deal with it. The real world isn't fucking 'Springfree', people. If it was a trampoline, it'd be a rotted old piece of shite with no pads, a collapsing frame, and rusty springs laced with tetanus, scrapie and TEH AIDS. That's right, parents. Buying this unmitigated pile of driftnet-lined arse is akin to INJECTING YOUR CHILDREN DIRECTLY WITH THE HIV-1 VIRUS.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like responsible parenting to me.

But secondly, and far more importantly... I don't see how the fuck anyone is supposed to use this bastardized whitebait net for the most important role the backyard trampoline is pressed into, later in its life, as the kids start growing into teens and the grass starts growing around the long-abandoned frame-base of the tramp. That is, as backstop and automatic wickie for the all important World Series of Backyard Cricket. Every backyard cricketer knows that if personnel are limiting, you don't waste fielders on wicket-keeping. It's a shit gig anyway, standing at the back and collecting all the crap other people miss. You're telling me the goalkeepers in football get all the roots? Caddies in golf? No. Any gig where you can be replaced by a wall, a garage door, your Mum's camellias or, as world's best practice, an old rectangular trampoline tipped on its side and offset slightly from the stumps to account for right-handers batting on off stump (which, being a wheelie bin, was technically also middle and leg), is a pointless and thankless gig not worth doing by anyone. Even Gilly. Even Havock.

And yet these child abusers from the University of C*nterbury want to take that experience away from kids, and force them to crouch ad nauseum over a stinking wheelie bin in the middle of summer, miserably watching and waiting as their ex-grade cricketer mate tonks their other ex-grade mate's appalling excuse for leg spin over cow corner and into the neighbours' veggie patch.

To which there are only two rational responses.

One, set fire to the Springfree factory. The address is on their website. Better burn down UCanty as well, just to be certain.

and

Two. Go buy a proper (i.e. properly broken) old trampoline.

And a bag of $2 shop tennis balls.

And a multi-pack of insulating tape from Bunnings.

Apply (c) carefully to one side of (b).

Bring self on to bowl from the Southern or Garden Shed End.

Bowl fast, seam upright.

Wipe smile off face of ex-grade cricketer mate by swinging one in from three feet outside off and castling leg.

Then go raid the old man's beer fridge, because you can, because you're all old enough. If not quite old enough to know better.

I love Christmas.


The Doctor is OUT.