Cardigan

 

Photo courtesy of Lisa Hazlegreaves and Small Child.

I can see you all wondering what cardigans have to do with Doctor Who.  Let me enlighten you, in my first blog post  ( http://itsmotherwho.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/i-need-doctor.html ) I go some way to explaining my love of Who, and how for me it’s not simply a programme that I love on television.  It’s the one and only time in my week when my children and I sit together, quietly; sharing the roller coaster of emotions you are dragged through by the minute.  Initially it was just a seven year old daughter and me that watched, my small child being well, too small.  Now daughter spent a lot of time with Granny over her formative years, and Granny is a massive Buffy fan, so daughter had been subjected to monsters before she could talk, therefore Doctor Who was a mere trifle to her...Daleks...bring em on...Autons? Meh!  Small Child however is a totally different being, he has the same relationship with Who that I did as a child, he loves it beyond compare but there are episodes in which father has to remove small child from the room because small child can take no more.  Doctor Who Confidential was a wonderful thing to abate nightmares, often I would tape both the episode and Confidential and small child and myself would watch Confidential first, this way he could see The Weeping Angels dancing and being silly and this would go some way to allaying nightmares....some way, I’m not sure he has ever recovered from The Time of Angels and I’m hoping his more mature 8yr old self will have recouped enough bravery to enable him to watch the heralded episode in Series 7 in which Amy and Rory leave in a blaze of Weeping Angels in New York.

Apologies I digress....so the first episode small child watched with us coincided with a rather nasty bout of flu for me, there I was in the middle of summer with 73 layers of clothes on and still shivering and I have this cardigan.  It’s a very old cardigan, large, warm and comfy that I had chosen as my top layer.  As the show ran on I went from shivering to sweating and undid the rather fetching brown buttons.  As a rule I have Daughter to the left of me and small child to the right, small child was getting closer to me by the minute, and at a crucially scary monster moment buried himself within my giant woolly cardi.  For me it’s like comforting a slightly baggy sheep, at times I’m not even sure which way up his head is, he is so far within.   So the following week, small child’s episode 2, we assumed our positions on the sofa, the titles begin to roll and small child asks ‘where’s your cardi’  I turned to look at him with a raised eyebrow, a look passed down from my mother  ‘it’s hot, it’s probably in my cupboard’ say I  ‘can you get it’ he whimpers, so I retrieve the cardi and put it on, and this dear readers has become part of our Doctor Who ritual,  whatever the temperature you will find me sitting as the titles go up the screen in an old baggy brown cardigan that is more than a simple cardigan, that is now as much part of Doctor Who as The Doctor himself, that is now a safe hiding place for my son when the monsters come calling.