An Afternoon With Big Momma

Half term is here. Hooray. I can't think of a more fun time in life. The children are back. They are winding down from their hectic school lives. It's a time of laughter. It's a time of togetherness and catching up on things. I only wish it lasted for more than a week.

There are no buses. No school buses or school trips, so it is a chance to go to new places in the car. Everything improves at Half Term. The traffic halves because there are no frantic mothers on the school run, taking no prisoners as they are worried about being late. The standard of driving seems better too, with mainly business folk hurrying to their destinations.

Yesterday brought a visit to the Chinese restaurant, followed by the cinema. The problem of being a rural bus driver is that there is a high probability that you will run into one of your passengers. I did. Several, in fact. And that was why we went to see Big Momma's: Like Father Like Son.

It was both the correct and the incorrect choice. Right in that I guessed that none of my rural passengers would go and see Big Momma. Wrong, because the reason they didn't go to see it, was because it was such an appalling, lowest common denominator film. A cross between Some Like It Hot and a film about rappers; Nuns On The Run meets Fame; The Nutty Professor and Stomp The Yard, the jokes came from Zoolander or Scary Movie.

Perfect!

The children loved it. And in every rotten movie, there is always something good. In Big Momma there was one of the most puerile pieces of slapstick when he/she dances on a table. Big Momma's legs fly in the air in a computer generated way, lands flat on the table which promptly disintegrates. The whole cinema roared with laughter. It went on for some time too. I laughed long too. My sides hurt. I still laugh thinking about it. But then, one man's meat is....

As we left the cinema and ventured back into reality, I heard a voice behind me:

"Hello Mr Bus Driver. And what are you doing here?"

I have to thank 107 minutes with Big Momma for my disingenuous reaction of pretending to have been deafened by the surround sound blasting out rap music, and the quickening of my pace as we strode out towards the car park.