"Let's go all the way" - the pained cry of the stereotypical adolescent male. The implication is clearly that he doesn't want to be led by the libido, to a point and left there, promise unfulfilled and frustrated.
As a male who has, perhaps thankfully, long since passed his adolescence, and who has two rows of seats in the minibus full of evidence that I've been all the way there and back at least a few times now, I feel that I should be beyond that kind of un-fulfilled frustration.
But I'm not. As an adult male and father, I find myself constantly wanting to say to people "Let's go all the way".
Take cafes for instance. The modern cafe is often a "family friendly" affair with crayons, drawing books, games and, in some cases, adjacent parks for the children to entertain themselves. But they don't go all the way.
What they need is a hoho. Allow the late Sir Terry Pratchett to explain:
"It contained the hoho, which was like a haha only deeper. A haha is a concealed ditch and wall designed to allow landowners to look out across rolling vistas without getting cattle and inconvenient poor people wandering across the lawns. Under Bloody Stupid's errant pencil it was dug fifty feet deep and had claimed three gardeners already."
These places need a hoho to keep children, who should be occupied drawing houses, climbing rope-pyramid things, breaking limbs and/or beating the daylight out of each other, from wandering into the cafe and disturbing adults who have given up on parenting for a little while and would like to spend some quality time complaining to each other about the price of childcare or the state of the job market.
Without a hoho, it's like the market street of a third-world country where you can't commune with the authentic, Chinese made Egyptian souvenirs in peace because of the endless demands of the urchins around you.
And, frankly, I think the kids would enjoy a garden designed by Berthold Studdley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson.
Back to the minibus reference. Modern conveyances of this type feature roof mounted DVD players and multi-zone air conditioning to keep the kids occupied and comfortable during the frankly tedious hours spent traversing this wide, brown ... featureless ... dull ... hot, dry and generally mind-numbing land of ours.
OK, great, but let's go all the way. I want a perspex screen between the front seats and the back. I need to be able to see them, to make sure that the violence has not descended into actual or grievous bodily harm, but I don't need to hear them. London cabs are the model here. I have no intention of mistreating or abandoning them. I'm more than happy for the kids to have a little water tube each and a pellet dispenser that provides food if they press their little notes up against the switch.
After school care is a great thing. Schools run 8.30 - 3 if we're lucky. Real life and real jobs run 8.30 - 5.30 on a good day. Then there's the commuting.
So we hand the kids, and an outrageous sum of money, over to a group of uni kids earning extra drinking money to take care of our beloved offspring in the period between the start of the teacher's nervous breakdown and the commencement of witching hour.
Take them, feed them, let them run around. Great, but let's go all the way.
Do their #$% homework with them! Do you have any idea how difficult it is, at 7pm, after you've worked yourself up into a 3 drink nervy trying to get dinner, baths, notes, washing and ironing done, to get the kids to do homework? How much do you think they (or I) care about meditating for 1/2 an hour a week or making a multi-phase hydrogen powered space-borne telescope out of crepe paper and toilet rolls about an hour before bedtime?
Or a bloody diorama!
Guys, there is some wisdom in the words of the teenage male. Let's go all the way.
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