I know you won't approve of this, but every now and then I take the kids to the McDonald's over the road.

As a matter of fact, I don't feel the need to rationalise it. Anti-McDonalds cant is nothing more than middle class snobbery, an affectation meant to emphasise superiority to working class tastes. Most of those arguments you hear about it are rubbish - thank you, our kids are not obese or even average weight. As for the corporate deathburger thing? Please. There is nothing more intellectually demeaning than directing pseudo-progressive analysis at fast-moving consumer goods suppliers simply because they are retailers. How ironic that the people with the fattest, laziest philosophical analysis spend so much time targeting fat and leisure. Although McDonald's could help themselves. When you go to their website, they ask you to select your 'country/market'. I mean honestly, you can smell their greed can't you? There are no countries, only country/markets. And they wonder why they're the target of so much nihilistic cynicism.

Anyway, so the kids enjoy themselves and their happy meals. The promo at the moment, which is the point of this discursive rave, is with Happy Meals they give away minute boom boxes, which play one song. The sound is badly distorted and tinny, the snippet of song is thirty seconds long and it takes about three plays to start driving me up the wall. But, hell, I bought it for them.

Carlo walks around the house with two boomboxes playing different songs, one pressed to each ear, starting and restarting them, nodding out of time to the beat and mixing discs like p-Money.

One of the songs is that deeply irritating Aqua 'song', 'Barbie'.

You know the one: "I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie wo-ooorrrllld. (Come on Barbie, let's go pardy)."

Carlo plays it over and over.

When Maria first heard it, she looked stunned and said to me, "The Barbie World! I would like to go there."