Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.

 

Saying it simply, sliding to a fall and getting home quickly

Because English is a Germanic language that has absorbed a huge number of words of Latin origin, often via French, it contains quite a few pairs of words meaning roughly the same thing, each from a different root. As often as not, the Latin-derived one is longer and more learned, making it feel more pompous, than the other, simpler Anglo-Saxon term. 

You can describe someone as parsimonious, a fine term of Latin root, or simply say he’s mean, which is simpler, shorter and means pretty much the same.

You can observe things if you want to make sure we understand that what you were doing was intense and possibly research-oriented, otherwise you might simply say you watched them. 

You might feel that someone else (though never yourself, of course) is mendacious, rather than describing him as lying. To express myself (or say things) in a more demotic (or everyday) way, I might say he’s a lying git. That’s how a Londoner (and I’m the son of a Cockney and an adopted Londoner myself) might characterise (or simply call) such a person. Now ‘lying git’ is just as long as ‘mendacious’ in syllables, though it’s shorter in letters and a lot more colourful.

For that matter, take policemen. In Britain, some of them tell us that they go out on foot patrol and proceed along various thoroughfares. We, on the other hand, might think of them as bobbies on the beat, walking down the street (which even has the merit of rhyming).

I’ve been suffering from an earache for some time now. Eventually my general practitioner (or family doctor) decided I needed to see a specialist. This being Spain, that meant having to visit a department of Otorrinolaringología. That can be abbreviated, as it is in French, to ORL, but I noticed that everywhere I saw the specialty displayed – say on signs directing me to my destination (necessarily quite long signs) – it was written out in full. 

To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pronounce that mouthful. Not just in Spanish, come to that. Oto-rhino-laryngology exists in English too. I’m glad to say, though, that the term is generally only used in technical jargon. In England, I’d have gone to see an ENT specialist.

That’s someone who deals with disorders of the Ear, Nose or Throat.

Even a mug can understand the problem

The visit itself went quite well. The doctor prescribed a new treatment which (I hardly dare say this) may actually be working. He commented on my surname – Beeson – which he rightly identified as not particularly Italian in origin, which is surprising for someone born in Rome. I was impressed not only by the lighthearted way he was talking to me – which I welcomed – but with the thoroughness with which he’d read my record. No other doctor has ever commented on my Italian birth, probably because they hadn’t noticed.

Indeed, the only setback, or rather downside, literally, of the whole experience came on the way to the appointment. We’ve had a lot of rain here recently and I can state, from experience, that a heck of a lot of the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Also it creates a lot of mud.

I was cycling quite quickly along a cycle path and didn’t notice the patch of mud ahead until I hit it, on a curve which I’d already started to take before I realised what was about to happen. What was about to happen then happened. The wheels slid out from under me, and I found myself horizontal when I should have been vertical. And splattered in mud when I should have been clean.

This kind of fall has happened to me rather a lot in recent months, which is a lot more than most other people I know who use their bikes regularly. Each time I think it’s down to my misfortune (or perhaps I should say bad luck), but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m just accident-prone.

Anyway, the result was that I turned up or my appointment with a grazed knee and elbow and mud on my shorts and shirt. I decided not to mention the mud, and neither did the doctor or his assistant, which struck me as not just tactful but much the least stressful way of dealing with the issue.

On the way back, I asked Google to find me a route and display it on my phone. Now, there were moments along the route when I was in known territory and realised that there were better ways to go than it was suggesting. That might be only because they avoided travelling along motorways surrounded by traffic doing 120 km an hour or more (including lorries). However, and I appreciate that this is undoubtedly merely a subjective reaction of my own, when I take a different route from the one suggested by Google, I always have the sense that it’s somehow offended. Even when, to be fair, it really ought to know better. Indeed, even when it turns out that it really did know better.

At one time, when I turned away from the Google route, I could almost hear it saying to me, ‘oh right, you’ve decided not to take my recommendation that would get you home in 40 minutes, have you? On your head be it. Let me just recalculate. Your route, smartarse, will take you a full 32 minutes.”

Honestly. My route was quicker than what it had suggested. And it knew.

So here’s my question: if it knew that all along, why didn’t it recommend the quicker route in the first place?

Still, at least I got home in one piece and with no further falls. Which was fortuitous. Or, as we say in plain Anglo-Saxon, bloody lucky.