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It’s Lord of the Flies not Lady of the Whatever Women Use To Do Up Their Trousers. Which Incidentally They Shouldn’t Be Wearing.
This morning my daughter was on the bed using a water pen to “colour in” the pictures in one of those books where the pigments in the paper are activated by H2O. “How are you, Phoebe?” I asked. She said, “Don’t talk to me, I’m drawing.” I was both impressed by her use of vocabulary and crushed by the fact that at just 30 months old, she has already totally turned on me. I could have said, “You’re not even drawing, You’re just dampening some paper and causing the colour to appear. So maybe you’re not as clever as you think.” But I decided to be the bigger man about it, not say anything and then later, when she’d forgotten the whole thing, eat chocolate in front of her and not share any of it. That’d teach her.
We were at the new house today, cleaning and preparing the bit of the house that is habitable so that we can hopefully move in next week. I was keeping Phoebe entertained in our small garden, blowing bubbles and playing hide and seek. Phoebe hid in the tree that dominates the space and which I had been talking about getting rid of as it means there is little space to play. I noticed that big green apples were growing in the branches. Phoebe and I picked six of the fruit. We can make a great apple crumble with those. For FREE (if you ignore the price of the other ingredients). Those six apples have certainly put the cost of the house and the repairs required into some kind of context. I am, it turns out, a winner. And the tree is going to have to stay as it can (for probably a two week period in the autumn) sustain my family (if you ignore us having to buy the other ingredients to make them a viable food stuff). Living in the country is amazing. They have food just growing out of the ground.
Although we were all starving by 1.30 and hadn’t found the apples by then and it took me about 45 minutes to find a shop that would sell us a sandwich and get back to the house. So swings and roundabouts.
