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There was a special event in Hitchin and Hermitage Road was closed and there were some rides and classic cars and other things to do. Ernie had excitedly rushed to go into a display that gave you an experience of caving, but after he'd done it became scared. "I forgot that I had asthma of caves," he kept saying. He meant claustrophobia, but I think we should change the term now.
Later on a dog walk I walked past a tree that had shed it's weird curly soft pine cones (they are catkins apparently). I felt like I was walking over Nature's Wotsits. My son is not the only poet in the family. It made me sad that if Adam and Eve fancied a Wotsit, they had to eat a weird pine cone. For most humans who ever lived, this would be the closest they got to one. I ate a handful and they just weren't cheesy enough. Proving once again man's superiority to nature.
On another dog walk, for some reason, I thought of the time when I was a baby that my parents had left me in a car on a sunny day. I don't remember this one, well not consciously, but subconsciously it may have had some effect on my whole life and explain my hatred of abandonment and green houses. I don't think they were gone for long (though it's crazy that 1960s parents thought it was OK to do this -
I once accidentally left baby Phoebe in the car for a couple of minutes as we searched for Catie's mobile and felt like the worse parent ever - though I got an episode of Relativity out of it).
I don't think I was left in the car for very long and they'd cracked a window (giving access to any baby snatchers in the area), but on their return I was very red and crying. Luckily for me I didn't die and was just mentally scarred for life, but I thought of the alternative timeline where I hadn't been so lucky and how my parents' lives might have gone. I suspect not very well. I mean it was the 1960s so they probably wouldn't have gone to prison because all parents left their kids places then, but how would you get over something like that?
Hopefully this blog will lead to them finally being prosecuted.
As parents we've all got stuff like this. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the time I had baby Ernie in a front facing sling and was packing stuff in the car and basically forgot he was there. I went to close the boot of our people carrier, which I would usually have done with a slam, but luckily this time went more cautiously. As it descended I remembered Ernie was there and that the boot door would hit him in the head and stopped in time. But man, that could have gone a lot worse.
We all survived in spite of our parents, not because of them.
