A few days ago while walking home from town the cogs at the back of my brain started turning. I’m not entirely sure why they started turning, but they did, and I wrote down what was turning over and over, which was lucky really, because moments later the universe landed a size twenty eight foot on me.
As I finished writing the thought down - while approaching a narrow footpath that leads towards home from the town centre - a teenager on an electric scooter (which are illegal here), shot out from the footpath doing perhaps 25 miles per hour. His shoulder missed mine by inches. In the moments that followed, I wondered what would have happened if he had hit me. Given that I was perhaps twice as heavy as him, and I had a moment to react, I can only imagine the tangled mess he would have ended up in as he catapulted away from me.
Upon arriving home, after an hour eating breakfast on my own, my entire weekend got tipped upside down and shaken vigorously. In order for my youngest daughter to eject furniture from her room (a long story for another day), and in order to avoid throwing said furniture away, I re-arranged the junk room - the room I spend most days working from. While it sounds simple, it was anything but - because it involved moving floor to ceiling book-cases - which had to be emptied and re-filled in turn. By Sunday afternoon, and after several trips to the rubbish dump, the main part of the job was complete.
We then went out yesterday evening with friends - a trip out to the pub together for a meal. As the night wore on the usual affirmations were made about “doing this more often”. I smiled and said nothing, having cancelled my day off plans twice in three days for others. How anybody thinks anybody else can plan anything at all is beyond me. Or maybe it’s just me that gets thrown under every bus at every opportunity?
Anyway.
I remembered today that I had written something down to write a blog post about - and tried to remember why it had seemed like such a big thing at the time. Alas, much of that has gone, but it’s still a good subject, so I’m going to throw it out there anyway.
If you have children, at what age did they stop holding your hand? My daughters all went through a phase of me apparently ruining their street cred pretty horribly - for several years (and let’s face it, they’re not wrong) - before slowly returning. While walking through London a little while ago, in a busy crowd, my eldest daughter - 25 this year - reached out and grabbed my hand for the first time in ages.
That thought percolated - as thoughts tend to - and turned into a second thought. At what age do children figure out that their parents are not all-seeing, all-knowing super-beings? At what age do they figure out that everybody’s making it up as they go along?
Sure, some of us are better at making it up than others, but we’re all faking it really, aren’t we?