These days I feel what I have at my disposal are not lengthy hours that allow for flow and continuity but pockets of time. This is how the editor I am working with described it. Obviously, she is also a mother, and that accounts for how quickly she offered this terminology. And I’ve been thinking about the implications of describing a unit of time as a pocket. It is akin to putting your hands in a shirt or trouser pocket and suddenly discovering not a 1 Euro coin but a 10 Euro note. You don’t feel just lucky, you feel blessed, because you had hoped just to be able to find only a pocket, and instead you found this grace. It is why I have been more productive than before I became a mother, because procrastination is simply not an option. If things slip, they do because I’m juggling five hands, not because I have forgotten. The one thing I have, however, had to consciously remind myself to do is to allow for moments of idleness and leisure. The idleness involves drinking a cup of chai and staring into space, while leisure can include reading, writing, watching something on Netflix, or taking a walk alone. 

During a recent pocket of leisure time, I managed to browse through three pages of the local newspaper and found that some conservative catholic Italian groups have taken umbrage to the fact that the creators of the marvellous Peppa Pig have incorporated a lesbian couple in the series, thus normalising non-cis heteronormativity. My first impulse was to question why the wrong kind of people seem to have more time than I. My second was to think of them as narrow-minded idiots living under a rock. Later, I read that in the latest episode, a character named Penny says that she lives with her mummy and her other mummy. One is a doctor, the other cooks spaghetti. They then sit down together to eat. A group called Brothers of Italy has found this ‘unacceptable’. Their spokesperson, Federico Mollicone has lamented, “Can’t children just be children?” and frames this move as gender indoctrination, a move by the politically correct. Peppa Pig has broadcast for the last 18 years. I recently watched it because I thought it would be a great way to learn German. It is true that the inclusion of a lesbian couple was the outcome of an online petition. Still, the inclusion is significant. The irony is that it is the cis-heteronormative culture that prevents children from being children, constantly gendering them without allowing them agency to define their personhood and infantilising them by making decisions for them. It is hypocrisy in action. But Brothers of Italy is asking for a ban on this episode, which means it may never be screened on Italian TV.