To start a new week in style, we heard two horror stories involving parents and their offspring.

Our first story today comes from China – but I guess this could have happened anywhere!

Now if you’re a parent, you know that if you take your offspring somewhere they don’t want to go, there’ll be wails of protest, glum expressions and possibly tantrums.

A visit to a museum, is almost certain to be greeted with cries, that “it’s boring” and demands that alternatives be offered.

But if you persist and force them to go inside, they’ll either hang gloomily on to your arm and have to be dragged along, unless of course some kind of distraction occurs to take their minds off things, but this is just when things can go horribly wrong.

Which is just what seems to have happened when two children started running round in a museum in Shanghai.

Apparently, momentarily unsupervised, the two youngsters chasing each other around, climbed over a belt barrier, colliding with a cased display containing a glass blown replica of Cinderella’s Castle at the Walt Disney World Resort.

Whoops!

The damaged item worth £50k had been donated to the museum in 2016 to mark its 6th anniversary.

Apparently the parents have apologised for the incident and agreed to take responsibility for the cost of repairs, but due to current travel restrictions, the Spanish glassblower who made the item, cannot travel to see the extent of the damage or estimate the repair costs involved.

For their part the museum has urged visitors not to run around or cross protective railings.   

Meanwhile can you even begin to imagine the atmosphere in the car on the way home?

“You’ll be going straight to your room – without any tea. In fact I don’t know when we’ll be able to afford to give you tea ever again!”

Meanwhile from the other side of the world comes another cautionary tale.

A mother gave her son a debit card to use for his school lunches, but after a while he started to top up the amount available for him to spend, directly from his mother’s account.

When the mother finally received her statement, she discovered, that bit by bit, he had transferred US$20K (about £15,800) over just a couple of weeks, which he had used to pay for donations and subscriptions to the live stream gaming platform, TWITCH.

Years of savings had vanished in just 17 days!

The woman involved has been told by her bank that unless she presses charges against her son, that the incident will be classed as friendly fraud.

In the meantime all her accounts have been frozen and debit cards cancelled. 

So far there has been no response to her messages to the customer service department at Twitch.

But as usual, it seems that her son’s knowledge of the internet has surpassed that of his mother, who is now trying to come to terms with what happened and just why his son did what he did.

Someone else who could be going without school lunches and other meals for a while, I should’t wonder.

I’ll leave you to ponder on that note and look forward to having your company again tomorrow, when we may be able to gloat over someone else’s misfortune,

Scott