Warming Up

Every day on our walk down to the beach we pass a business with a picture of a snow boarder in the window. Ernie always points at it and says “Daddy”. He has yet to see the youtube clip of me skiing, so I don’t think he’s being sarcastic. It is, however, possible that he knows something about his true parentage that I don’t.  Though in that case his real dad might also be a headless mannequin in a clothes shop in town, or the bear in his postman bear book, or Tim Lott the journalist or anyone of about 100 people and things that he refers to as daddy in the day.

But I particularly like the snowboarding daddy as it’s so far from being the real me. I told Phoebe about how I don’t like snow-based sports (though tragically she has inherited her mother’s genes on this and is very keen to try skiing - the ultimate tragedy is knowing that she will be better at it after 30 seconds than I can ever hope to be) after we passed the picture the other day. But tonight even she had to ask, “Is that really daddy in that picture?”

It’s so hard to discern truth from fiction when you’re a kid. And we’d just spent thirty minutes playing April Fool over dinner where Phoebe had kept saying, “Look behind you, there’s a big, big, big monster” and I had fallen for it every time, but where she would say “I know you are April Fooling me” every time I did it. Until I went a bit left field and said “There are 700 potatoes behind you.” Even though that was as unlikely as a monster, the possibility that there might be was irresistible, but she whispered in a proper Andrew Collings’ aside to her mum to have a look for her. 

And occasionally she’s seen me appearing on TV (I mean very occasionally obviously) or seen my picture online or whatever, so I guess that makes it more confusing. I might be a super fit athlete, snowboarding at 45 degrees down a mountain. I think she thought the potato thing was more likely though.