Backwards Talk

Backwards Talk ©

By Michael Casey

My small daughter and me love fizzy pop, my Shanghai wife is against this. So my small daughter has decided to backwards spell what she wants, so Dr Pepper becomes reppep rd. It’s hard enough for me to follow, the plan is that for my wife’s Chinese brain it will be impossible.

So the theory goes, but the wife and the Chinese are very very clever. So I have to sneak out without being spotted. Then come home victorious, hiding the pop up my jumper.

Come and have your medicine I call from another room, then conspiratorially me and my small daughter have Dr Pepper. I perhaps should explain one daughter is Western frame and looks like a clone of me. Whereas the other daughter is much smaller and much more Shanghai wife in size.

Our plan has worked we are enjoying the Dr Pepper together, only my small daughter gives the game away. BURP, she burps like a Sumo Wrestler, which is what  I’m compared to on occasion.

A dad’s job is never done, I am ordered to sneak out to the store for chocolate, fruit and nut by Cadbury’s is the current favourite, so again I have to sneak out like a burglar in reverse. Then I return like an all-conquering hero and do a lap of honour around the living room, as I break and share the chocolate.

My girls love chips as a treat, why? Because they follow Shanghai diet, which is rice with everything. There is also a lot of fish and chicken, white meat as it is called. So dad has to be persuaded to go to the chippie, or to buy roast potatoes that you bake in the oven.

I am a modern hunter gatherer, thought I don’t have a spear and a hide to cover myself with. My wife would tan my hide if she caught me ruining our girls Shanghai diet. So I have to sneak out.

In the interests of diet supervision the wife has to eat 1/4 of the chips and/or roast potatoes. So parenting is all about spelling snacks backwards, now GoGo, which means go to bed/sleep, though it could mean OGOG.