LittleSod is Banned

I've had to ban one of my eldest's friends from coming to the house. I came home one day to find that the little sod, E, had thrown the pebbles next to the house all over the path and drive.

When I asked why he'd done this, my eldest told me that he had refused to let him in as he was following instructions to tidy his room and do his homework. LittleSod hadn't accepted this and had kept ringing on the door, yelling up and finally throwing pebbles at the house. He even tried to climb up the front of the house to my eldest's bedroom window.

The child is insane! He is no respecter of privacy or the desires of others either. He hasn't grasped that if you ring on a door and no one answers it's because either there's no one there, or there is and they don't want to open the door.

Even the tiny kid down the road has understood this after I shouted at him one day. I was in the house and on the phone. He came calling for my youngest who wasn't in and rang the doorbell at least 15 times. Still on the phone, I eventually went to open the door, excused myself to the person on the other end, and gave the kid a bollocking. He hasn't rung the doorbell more than once since!

LittleSod, on the other hand, is, as my eldest says, typically French. This is most interesting, because, according to him, if you tell someone when you're out with them chatting, for example, that you want to go in and watch your favourite The Simpsons programme, they get all stroppy and don't talk to you for a week. You are not allowed to leave them alone to do something else - it's taken as a personal insult.

Usually my eldest asks me to call him in at a certain time, say for dinner, or to do his homework, just so he can escape without causing a diplomatic incident. LittleSod is not the only one to get offended either, it's most of the friends who are like that too. They don't respect the fact that people lead their own lives - they want a jealously claustrophobic relationship.

Anyway, I told my eldest that if LittleSod wants to see him, he'll have to telephone first because he is not coming to the door any more, and they can meet elsewhere. I'm not going to forbid my eldest from seeing him because I know that that would make him forbidden fruit and very exciting. As it is, he's just a pain in the arse.

It's a shame, really, because underneath the brat there's a nice kid. A kid with parents who work very hard and are often not around, so he's left to his own devices and, I believe, tries to get the attention he's lacking from his parents from his friends. Anyway, he's no more than an 'ami de fortune' who'd be forgotten as soon as moved away.

Pot de colle, my eldest calls him...