Warming Up

Out for a morning stone clear, in which I anticipated I’d be mobbed by grateful villagers, thanking me for my brilliant comedy performance. But the people here respect me and my privacy too much and the people I bumped into were polite enough to not even bring the thing up. But for thoughts on the task of clearing the moon, dealing with dog poo fingers and the dangers of a newbie clearing for too many hours, listen here.

I feel we might be coming out of the tunnel of parenting being an exhausting succession of fires to put out. Our son is still a handful, but less so than three months ago. We generally get to sleep til 6am now with only the briefest of disturbances (which makes all the difference in the world and going out somewhere with both the kids can sometimes be described as fun. We went on a post school shopping trip and then on for a pizza and we got through the whole thing with hardly any tears or raised voices or arguments. It felt like we’d somehow joined another family. 

At the multi-storey car park my daughter wanted us to go as high up as possible and I remembered that I was (of course) exactly the same as a child, unable to understand why anyone would make the boring choice of parking on a low level, when you could go up to the roof. Now as an adult I finally understood my parents’ position, that you always want everything to take as little time and effort as possible. I think once or twice my parents relented to my wishes and took me up past empty floors of car park to the roof. I can’t remember exactly what happened, but have a feeling that it was just cold and wet and a bit scary and I didn’t like it. As so often what you wish for in life is often not worth the having.

It was all a bit of a trip down memory lane, whilst experiencing stuff from the other point of view today. We went to pick up some bits of school uniform at Marks and Sparks and my time was spent chasing Ernie up and down the aisles and him being fascinated by the mannequins, who had been battered by other kids all day long - one boy mannequin had his arm hanging off inside his jumper, another had his wig casually tossed behind him. The mannequins seemed to be the same as the ones I would have manhandled in the 1970s. Maybe they keep them the same for the Proustian rush. None of the mannequins were nude though, but I still remembered the hot flush of excitement and embarrassment at passing windows of undressed and probably headless mannequins with my mum. Those nippleless wonders were the closest I got to sex for a long time. And they made me afraid. Which was the correct response.

And I remembered how scary the whole world is to a 4 year old when on returning to the car my daughter froze with terror. I couldn’t understand why as there was nothing going on, but she’d been freaked out by the sound of an unseen train passing by under the car park. When you’re four, you know enough to know the world had hidden horrors, but not enough to sift out the stuff that is actually benign. And thinking about it that noise was so unworldly and monster-like, that it’s amazing we don’t all live our lives cowering in the shadows.