I love kids.
That's a sentence that a childless 39 year old man is not really allowed to use any more for fear of being chased out of his home by an angry mob of idiots. But I don't care. I do love kids and maybe should come up with some harmless Greek word to describe myself.
Paedo means child and
phile is the suffix generally used to indicate love of something and so... I am going to stop here for fear of this harmless joke being taken out of context. In any case
I wouldn't want to repeat myself. That would never do.
So let's start again. I think kids are great and I seem to generally get on well with them (I feel I am still on dodgy ground, but that says more about the state of our society than anything else. Please do not attack my house with bricks). It's probably because they recognise me as a kindred spirit or maybe even pity me for my childishness, but all but those occasional devil children who just stare at me as if I am an idiot when I try to make them laugh seem to get me. Sometimes I feel that it's only the children who really understand me. I am like Michael Jackson in that respect. Oh dear it's just getting worse.
This afternoon I was round at a friend's house and I met her two and a half year old son for the first time. Initially cautious of this newcomer he kept himself to himself, but gradually he became curious about me and then started to demonstrate some of his toys for me. There is still a part of me that is massively impressed by toys. I really enjoyed playing as a kid, and could wile days away with my toy cars or action men or Subbuteo. As my brother and sister were older than me I often played alone, but was happy with this. In fact as an older kid I played Subbuteo against myself for hours on end, even having a little file which documented the scores of the games and leagues set up, that were always won by Leeds United and then when I switched allegiance York City. What a sad and unusual child I was. I wonder if those statistics still exist anywhere.
Anyway my new friend showed me his impressive talking digger and his remote control Thomas the Tank Engine and we played with those for a couple of minutes. But then his mum put a plastic spider on his head and we started to play with that. I was pretending the spider was biting me, which made him laugh and we threw it at each other in an attempt to frighten ourselves. Then somehow this developed into a game where the spider had amazing leaping powers and he would throw it up in the air and see where it landed. Sometimes it fell nearby, but at other times it was behind a sofa or had gone many feet across the room and so it needed to be found.
The expensive digger and train toys had occupied the lad's attention for maybe three minutes maximum, but the tiny, leaping spider that must have cost a maximum of 20p kept him entertained for approaching an hour. Even when he had gone off for a bath, when he came back he still wanted to play with the spider. You can understand why parents must despair. You've bought your child loads of gifts for Christmas and it turns out to be a square inch of plastic that gives them the most pleasure.
The fun had no sign of abating and the only way to stop this exhausting cycle of spider throwing and searching was for me to surreptitiously hide the toy. The child continued his search in vain, not knowing the fake arachnid was up my shirt.
But he was so desperate to see his friend again that I couldn't keep it from him forever. "Maybe he has crept into your belly button," I suggested. And bless him, he had a little check to see.
I too checked my own belly button where the spider turned out to be more or less residing and so the relentless game continued again.
But I liked his commitment and his refusal to let this simple pastime go. I suppose in essence it is what I myself have done with a lot of my more annoying comedy routines. Do something amusing, keep going with it until it becomes irritating, perservere through thew tedium in the hope that suddenly it will become funny again. And for certain people it will never get funny. But I feel sorry for those people. Because throwing a plastic spider around a room for an hour or so is what life is all about. At least being able to enjoy such an activity without qualification and without becoming bored is what make kids great. And that's why I love them. And if that makes me want to rip me limb from limb then that's your problem.
