After three and a half hours of high-level toddler wrangling at Slimbridge this afternoon, R and I were barely up to more than toddling ourselves. Loading up the car with the Boy and his gear, and preparing to set off for home, I reacted with extreme disfavour to R’s suggestion that I should sit in the back with my adored grandson and entertain him. “Well, on your head be it if he goes to sleep,” said R. “It’s you who’ll be trying to get him to bed tonight.”
In the event the entertaining was done by B, and neither he nor (sadly) I went to sleep. For the first half hour the Boy did chatting, and then he sang to us for a while, working his way through his broadening repertoire of songs with great brio. (This was the day when R – aged more than he’d care for me to reveal to you – discovered that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and the ABCDEFG song are sung to the same tune – and my amusement about that was almost enough to compensate for the musical agony I suffered every time the former segued into the latter, rather than resolving.) Then, as we turned onto the A46 I said to R, referring back to a much earlier conversation, “So, would you like to go home via the Broadway Tower?” “Yes,” said a piping voice from behind me, “I would.” So, of course, we went.
The Boy and I were sitting on the café terrace, chatting about beetles and sunshine and such, when R, who’d gone inside to order coffees and a babyccino, returned to ask if I thought B might prefer a C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E I-C-E C-R-E-A-M T-U-B. Such was my state of exhaustion by this point that I just sat and stared at him, stupefied and mystified. Processing backwards, I arrived at ‘tub’ and could go no further. “Tub? What do you mean, tub?” Sighing heavily, and giving me a Special Look that might have impressed anyone else, R began spelling again, veeeerrrry slooooowly, until light dawned. “Oh, I said.” And then to B, “Babyccino, or ice cream?” “Yes,” replied the Boy.
I’d like to point out here that this isn’t any old ice cream. It’s Winstones Cotswold ice cream, and even I, who can take or leave most ice cream, and generally leave it on the grounds of it being a waste of calories, adore Winstones ice cream. Having set the Boy on the right path, ice cream wise, I’ve told him that one day when he’s a bit bigger we’ll go to Rodborough Common, where he can help me hunt blue butterflies, then have his choice of ice creams from the Winstones factory shop. R, who’s a much bigger fan of ice cream than I will ever be, is very much hoping that he’ll be allowed to come too.
