MARTHA MORPHS INTO MR. MOTIVATOR.
Before Martha was born, my wife and I made a conscious decision to keep her free from phone and tablet screens for as long as we could, pledging to keep our offspring engaged with us rather than zoned out on Peppa Pig in her pram. I think pre-birth Martha had overheard our conversation, and staged an in utero sit in protest, eventually coming out sixteen days after her due date, only after I had spent fourteen of those days skim reading the FBI hostage negotiation handbook before I spoke directly to mummy's tummy using a bullhorn and assured pre-Martha that she would still be able to watch TV, a good while before she knew what a TV was. Unfortunately, Mr. Tumble and Iggle bloody Piggle were both still viewable on a TV screen, so we didn't get to skip them through toddlerhood. He was always so weird and otherworldly looking, with that funny shaped head and nonsensical speech. Iggle Piggle was a bit strange too.
Once Martha had cast off her selection of wooden rainbows and the like, we purchased a Kindle tablet for the long car journeys to Butlin's, and filled its meagre megabytes of memory with an assortment of animation in order to avoid the "are we THERRRRRRRRRRRE yet?" game. Apart from the Butlin's road trips, Martha just left the Kindle in a drawer and happily made fully functioning medical kits and prototype nuclear weapons from an assortment of cardboard, pipe cleaners, tissue paper and string. At age five, she suddenly began asking for her iPad. I explained the not so subtle differences between iPads and Kindles (i.e. one is expensive and pretty awesome, and the other is the Kindle), but this was lost on her. The generic name for a tablet in Martha's World is officially 'iPad'. It's her more technologically advanced equivalent of my 'Sellotape' or 'Hoover'. She uses the tablet to video call grandparents far too often, and to leave voice messages if the grandparents don't feel like partaking in their 57th video call of the day, as Martha fails to get ready for school at 7:43am. Along with video chats, she became briefly engrossed in Hello Kitty’s nail salon game, which was just like the real world, but without that nose tingling acetone stench. You could upgrade to get the acetone smell feature, but I didn’t think it was worth the extra £3.99 per month.
One day after school, Martha came home, threw her coat on the floor at the door, kicked her shoes into next week, and sat on the Persian rug. She crossed her legs in a perfect Lotus position, made circles by joining her thumbs to her forefingers on both hands and exhaled a ‘namaaaaaaasteeeeeeeehhhh’ so soothing that I had to check behind the sofa to make sure we hadn’t got lost on the way home and ended up in a Yoga studio. We hadn’t. All I found behind the sofa were a thousand germ-riddled street feathers. I asked where THIS had come from, and Martha told me that they did yoga at school. She grabbed the TV remote (as this was the only piece of technology that she had used since early on, she navigates round it like a pro), and she opened up YouTube. Within seconds, we were lost in a world of Backstreet Boys videos and 'classic AJ'. Several hours later, Martha introduced me to the world of Cosmic Kids Yoga channel. It features a woman named Jaime, who somehow piggybacks the popularity of Spiderman, Minions, Encanto, Star Wars and many, many more in order to magically trick hyperactive school kids into chilling the fuck out and working through an interactive story that she tells via the medium of a million yoga poses. She signs off with a ‘nnamaaaaaaateeeeeeehhhh’. Of course she does. Jaime and her Cosmic Kids have 1.6 MILLION subscribers. I’m guessing that 1.599 million of those are knackered schoolteachers who just want to have a break from wrestling sharpened spoons from tiny ruffians for up to 31 minutes. I was introduced to Cosmic Kids through Jaime’s loose ‘interpretation’ of the Disney megafranchise 'Frozen’. Jaime turned it into some kind of Frozen/Yoga hybrid, a Fro-Yo, if you will. Or a half hour state of Fro-Zen.
Last Sunday, mum was in the kitchen when she heard Martha talking. Assuming it was some kind of cross-generational video chat, she popped her head into the living room. Martha was watching a Cosmic Kids yoga workout video on her ‘iPad’. Only she WASN’T. Martha had propped her ‘iPad’ up and set it to record video in selfie mode. She then recorded a sixteen-minute video of herself as a breathy yoga instructor taking her audience through many moves, ranging from the classic entry-level ‘standing up’ to the trickier ‘balancing on one leg’. She offered encouragement to her audience throughout, and didn’t once feel the need to pretend to be a fast hedgehog or a boy who had been bitten by a radioactive bastard spider to hook in her viewers. MetaMartha was balancing on one leg in the middle of the Persian rug, paying careful attention to Martha Motivator on the screen. At one point in the class, Yoga Instructor Martha told Martha the actual real world child to balance on one leg, and then told her she was going to try to blow her over. On screen Martha blew at the camera, and real-World Martha wobbled and chuckled.
Yoga Instructor Martha is now a mere 1.599,998 subscribers behind Jaime and her Cosmic Kids. She has accrued two very proud subscribers, who are both absolutely petrified that the after school transformation of Martha into aggressive Victorian schoolteacher (you’ll hear about her soon) to dippy hippy yoga instructor is imminent. I have my excuse planned already: “Sorry love, I can’t have you shout at me to stand on one leg for sixteen minutes, I have to make the namasss –tea”.
