Looking Good

As I went into the bedroom this morning, the first thing that struck me was the lovely flowery aroma permeating the air. The second thing was my son on my white duvet with a 2 inch thick layer of cream on his face. All that was visible was two eyes and a left nostril. His face looked like some loony impressionist had gone to town with a palette knife, while exploring his ‘White Period.”

I’ve read all the books, so with a calm, nonjudgmental voice, I asked, “Why have you got cream all over your face Codes?” To which he responded, “Don’t say why you got cream on your face?” This is his ‘talk to the hand’ response to questions he doesn’t want to answer. But I really wanted to know his thinking when he decided to smear all Ninas creams …..OH…did I forget to mention that the creams used weren’t body lotions and the such like, they were Ninas collection of face creams. Cody smelled like a ylang ylang infused kiwi fruit. Nina doesn’t buy many girly creams and applications, but when she does, its usually a pretty good one. So as Cody sat there amongst the Clinique, Clarins and other ozone loving, bunny friendly jars, I just had to know why he put the cream on his face.

I had to change tactics if I was to get anything out of him. If he battens down the hatches, I would get nothing, and I was dying to know. I weighed up my options and settled on the good old fallback tactic of bribery. The jist of it was that we would go to the shops and get some play-dough. But we had to get the cream off first, and to do this I had to know why he put it on. He thought for a while, which had me worrying that maybe I`d used this approach once too often, then he announced, “I’m putting cream on, just like David Beckham.”

The penny dropped straight away. With the World Cup 8 days away, every TV channel has soccer 24/7. Not only the sports and news channels as you might expect, but every program out there somehow manages to squeeze the soccer in to otherwise totally unrelated content. There is nowhere to hide. While scanning through the channels I was ambushed by BBC food. As Jamie Oliver hand tossed a rustic salad of freshly picked sidewalk weeds, he looks up at his guests and asks, “So when you go to South Africa for the World Cup, do you take your own chef or…………..?” I couldn’t bare to hear what Wayne Rooney was going to snack on after a tough game against one of the underfunded third world teams, so I flicked through till I had landed on the one channel that could not possibly be linked in any way to the football. Yip, the Animal Channel would be my refuge for a few hours, or so I thought, until ‘Pets of the World Cup Stars’ came on, so the TV went off.

Even though he is not playing, David Beckham is discussed more than any player, local or international. Cody must have seen one of the channels discussing mens products and David must have come up as an example. The mystery was solved, now all I had to worry about was my 7 year old autistic metro-sexual son, and what to sell to replace Ninas creams. With out them she would look li……,……no wait, better not go there.