A couple of quick notes; firstly, I have just noticed I have been absent since the middle of April. Not sure what happened there. Secondly; this post is likely to only be of interest to people with children, others may struggle to know what the hell I am banging on about.  For this I apologise.

So, here I am sat on my sofa waiting for my daughter to finish the long, slow, laborious process of eating a spready cheese sandwich before we go to her Tuesday afternoon dancing class.  The TV is on; a children’s channel showing daft cartoons and my daughter is engrossed. The programme of choice is called Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom.

Its actually a pretty amusing, kooky sort of programme about elves and fairies living at the bottom of a garden in a tiny little kingdom, the main protagonists being a king and queen fairy and their daughter Princess Holly and a family of elves (mummy and daddy elf) and their son Ben.  On the periphery of this bunch are the two best (in my opinion) characters; the Wise Old Elf and Nanny Plum.

i’m not going to go into any more detail; I’m not a critic and you probably don’t care.  On to the point (such as it is) of this post.

I found myself genuinely curious and concerned about the future of the little kingdom earlier, and for good reason. Here is why;

All the fairy children are little girls named after a plant (Holly, Strawberry, Plum, etc) and all the elf children are little boys (with rather more traditional names).

Lets just hope for the sake of the little kingdom that they have the same physiology.

It’s not that I think it would be wrong for elves and fairies to mix; on the contrary it will undoubtably improve the evolutionary chances of success…but what if they can’t reproduce? What if they have the same chances of reprodution as, say, a human and a chimpanzee. Similar enough in many ways; completely incompatable in many others.

That’s it; the end for elves and fairies (at least in this particular kingdom).

It’s worth thinking about anyway, but it is a subject that has yet to be addressed within the programme itself. I will continue to await the episode…