At the park this afternoon the Boy Wonder decided that he should share some of his cookie with the birds, to help them keep warm in the cold winter weather. Of course, when people talk about feeding the birds what they mostly mean are the small garden species, rather than Jackdaws, feral pigeons and juvenile Lesser Black-backed Gulls. But the Boy is too young to know that there’s a hierarchy of wildlife from “good” to “bad”, and I’m not inclined to try to explain it to him at this stage. I did warn him not to get too close to the gulls, which are renownedly snatchy, but in the event there was no problem because they stayed at a safe distance of their own choosing. He made a joke about this being because they were afraid of me taking their photographs, and amused himself into hoots of laughter.
Laughter was very much the theme of the day, with the Boy telling jokes and pranking us throughout. While R was pushing him on the swing in the playground he started out by lustily singing Jingle Bells, to the great amusement of the mother pushing the next swing along, but then moved on to telling me a story he made up himself. In this tale he swung high enough to get up to the moon, caught it, brought it back down to earth, and gave it to me to look at. Sadly though, when he let go of it, it floated away like a balloon (cue more hoots of delighted laughter), and flew back up to its place in the sky. The only way to have stopped that happening, he explained, would have been to have tied a string onto it and held it very tightly. I was, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, quite charmed by all of this.
