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There’s probably about 20-25 kids at Phoebe’s nursery that are roughly the same age as her, maybe pushing on to 40 if you include the babies that will be Ernie’s contemporaries (and a few more to be born perhaps). It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that we’re looking at a weekend birthday party every fortnight and maybe more regularly than that. I am going to be spending a lot of time thrown together with a group of people due to geography and the fact that they foolishly had unprotected sex at a roughly equivalent time to me.
As luck would have it they seem like a good bunch. Or maybe we find ourselves in the same boat and have decided not to be cunts to each other, because this is a long, long journey and there are no life boats or prospect of escape. And if you do escape to another passing ship in another location then you’re just going to be stuck with another group of strangers who procreated at a similar time to you.
What I am trying to say is that it was another birthday this afternoon, at a different soft play to the one we had Phoebe’s third birthday in, this time in St Albans. Had fate dealt us a different hand we would have been living in this city. We discussed that as we arrived. We nearly lived in three different houses and towns to the one we ended up in. What if the people who’d spunked up in or been spunked up in at about the same time as us were idiots? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Oh I just thought about it. How did God come up with the idea of making this how we reproduced? Given he started from scratch and could have done anything? I think we can all agree that God is a weird pervert.
The soft play was bigger than the one in Hitchin, but the air conditioning was poor (unless you were right underneath it in which case it was a bit too efficient). But the kids could get lost in the huge play area whilst the adults sat, looking tired and drinking coffee, so it’s a great birthday for everyone. And it was a two hour party. It’s pretty much perfect.
I enjoyed seeing how much joy whizzing down a tiny but quite steep slide gave to my little boy. I love how kids are delighted with simplicity. One little girl looked at the balloons behind the buffet table. “Who will get those?†she asked. It was clear that if it was her then this would be the best day of her life. “I think they will just stay here,†I said, “They have lots of parties here.†But I was wrong. The guys running these parties know more about the psychology of kids than I thought. Everyone got a balloon and a piece of cake (well all the kids - sadly I got neither) and left delighted.
