Summer grandparenting: penguins, fish and dragons

We’d been talking about penguins, Elliott and I, as one does when breakfasting with a four-year-old.

‘And you know,’ he solemnly announced, ‘they live near the North Pole.’

‘Near the pole,’ I agreed, but adding a gentle correction, ‘but the South Pole. There are no penguins near the North Pole.’

‘Oh, yes, there are.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I continued, as gently as I could.

‘Have you been to the North Pole?’ he countered.

He’d spotted the weakness in my argument.

‘No,’ I admitted, but then added, ‘Have you?’ 

I’d found the weakness in his.

‘Yes,’ he assured me, putting paid to my trivial objection, ‘for my birthday.’

Well, what could I say? It wasn’t, after all, completely inconceivable that his parents had taken Elliott to the Arctic for his birthday. Unlikely, it’s true, but not beyond the wildest of assumptions. After all, his parents like to make his birthdays special, and what could be more spectacular than a polar expedition as a celebration of turning four? And if he’d been there and seen penguins, I’d look pretty damn silly to be denying their existence, wouldn’t I? Empirical experience trumps learned belief. 

It’s true that discovering penguins in the Arctic would strike a serious blow to the beliefs of ornithologists, but why should we care for ornithology anyway? It’s all for the birds, I reckon.

This illuminating conversation took place at our home near Valencia, and during the third grandparenting session of the summer. 

First Matilda had come on her own. Well, perhaps I should say stayed with us on her own. I took a train to Madrid, collected her from her dad at the station, and travelled straight back to Valencia. At the end of the stay, her mother did the reverse, jumping on a train to Valencia’s main station, and travelling straight back with Matilda. It may sound like a painful waste of time, nearly four hours in trains with barely a pause at the destination, but Sheena and I agree that it’s a glorious way to get a rest and do a little reading.

Trains are the luxury form of travel of our era.

Less luxurious, it turns out, were the sleeping arrangements for Matilda. We’d decided to replace the old sofa bed which converted into two single beds for her and her brother. It wasn’t a particularly good sofa and, it turned out, it wasn’t a particularly good pair of beds either: it coped badly with three or four years’ use by young kids. That, I suspect, was at least in part due to its not being even adjacent to the top of the range from Ikea.

So we got a new one from further up the Ikea range. It’s a much better sofa. Sadly, as a bed it wasn’t half as successful. At least, not initially. It converts into a bed by lowering a hinged back to join the sofa seat, but of course it doesn’t join seamlessly. There’s a bit of a gap between the two, and Matilda made it clear that she was less than pleased with this new arrangement.

‘My old bed,’ she told us sadly, ‘was a winner.’

By contrast, the new one, with the gap down the middle, was a loser. 

The solution? A memory foam mattress that we lay across the bed to cover and neutralise the gap. And the reaction from Matilda? None at all. Which is excellent. No news is good news and no complaints means a satisfied granddaughter.

There are things that grandparents – well, grownups generally – say that they should perhaps learn to stop saying. I remember when I was a kid I loathed it when people asked me ‘shall I keep you here? Shall we send your parents home and you stay with me?’ I never knew what to reply to a suggestion that ludicrous.

Less ludicrous but perhaps not less futile are the questions that probe affection.

‘Who loves Matilda?’ Danielle asked.

‘Mamama and Granddad,’ Matilda immediately replied, correctly identifying Danielle and me, in that order.

‘And who loves Mamama and Granddad?’ Danielle pressed on, asking one more question than necessary and opening the door to a potentially regrettable response.

‘Elliott,’ said Matilda, providing one. 

Following her solo visit in June, Matilda was back the following month with the whole family. It was damn hot. But Elliott had no problem about pursuing the unconventional solution, demonstrating to us all what the elegant young man wears to breakfast in hot weather.

Elliott well-dressed for summer

He also showed us a fine way to spend the time in such conditions.

In the summer, just chill

Not that resting was an activity for him alone. He and his sister were both occasionally exhausted enough to need some recovery time.

Recovery time

What put them in this state was, above all, the pool. This was the summer for swimming. The pool we share with our neighbours offers two equal pleasures: meeting friends when they’re there, or ‘having the pool to ourselves’ as Matilda would put it, every time we arrived to find that they weren’t.

It's been a summer of rapid progress. In June, Matilda wasn’t yet ready to get rid of her aids – flotation vest or mask – but by July she was striking out without them and on this, the latest visit in August, when the two of them came with just their Dad, she’s been swimming full widths of the pool unaided. She’s even jumping in with complete confidence and without having anyone to hold her hand or catch her in the water. She hasn’t quite reached the stage of swimming a length – she still has to overcome her fear of the deep end – but that’ll come soon.

And just yesterday, as I write these words, Elliott too passed a new milestone. Without aids, he swam between his Dad and me, repeatedly. There are some small technical matters to overcome – like trying to get his body horizontal in the water instead of staying vertical with his nose just above the surface – but he was afloat and, most of the time, moving towards a goal.

They may not be quite ready to rival the fish, but they’re both on the way.

No wonder they got tired. But at least they could relax whenever they felt like it, watching their new favourite series, all about Vikings who tame dragons and have wonderful adventures with them. Truly relaxing, since each episode seems to follow exactly the same structure as every other – humans and dragons go somewhere that proves less safe than they think and find themselves battling with nasty villains, or the nasty villains come after them even when they stay at home – things go badly wrong until it looks as though disaster is unavoidable – and then, to our ever-repeated astonishment, things all work out just fine after all. Immensely enjoyable. 

Apparently.

So it’s been a summer of successful visits all around. With much to remember them by. Though, to be absolutely fair, I’m still not convinced that there are penguins at the North Pole.

I mean, I checked with ChatGPT which assures me there are none. But, hey, which is a more reliable source of information? Today’s halfbaked Artificial Intelligence or the natural intelligence of a four-year-old grandkid?

It’s a tossup, I’d say.

And another rite of passage:

Matilda dumping her milk teeth

Graduation granddaughter

It’s never too early to be thinking of a potential marriage. I mean, Catherine of Aragon was engaged to be married at the age of three. I know that ultimately didn’t work out too well but, hey, emulating her precocity doesn’t necessarily mean following destiny.

Our grandson Elliott is four and the subject of his marriage came up during a visit by Danielle (my wife, his grandmother) to his house late in May. 

The question was whether he should marry his closest, oldest friend Cora.

He thought about this for a moment before reaching a decision. 

‘No,’ he announced, ‘she’s much too bossy. She’s just a friend.’

So who would he marry?

He thought for a while again. ‘Maybe Lola. She isn’t bossy at all.’

But a while later, having had the chance to reflect on things, he thought better of that too. Lola, too, it seems is just a friend.

Matilda, in the meantime, had announced that she didn’t want to get married at all, or have kids. 

‘Then you can babysit mine,’ Eliott told her, ‘because you’ll be their aunty.’

Matilda’s developing her own fine way with words. On the occasion when Elliott fell asleep on the floor only to wake up crying, Matilda had her judgement ready.

‘Oh,’ she declared, ‘somebody got up from the side of the carpet today.’

Later, Danielle and I travelled back to the grandkids’ place, this time together, for a flying visit to attend a major event, a rite-of-passage marker. It was scheduled for 6 June 2025, which for some people might seem significant as the eightieth anniversary of the D-day landings in Northern France. Matilda had a different view. 

She showed me the pile of clothes she’d prepared days before and topped with a handwritten note. ‘6’ it proclaimed, for the date, followed by the word ‘Graduación’. In Spanish, of course, since we were talking about a notable event in the life of a Spanish school.

Now I’ll confess that in my naïve way, it seemed to me that graduation was something that turned you into a graduate. In other words, something that closed a period of undergraduate study at university (from undergraduate to graduate – all seems logical enough, doesn’t it?). I’d previously only been to one graduation event. A friend of mine had asked me to attend hers, when she received her University of London degree, a year before I did. 

As I’ve grown older (it’s true that at the time I was only 25, but that was still as old as I’d ever been up to then), I’ve become increasingly intolerant of boredom. And those three hours in the Albert Hall in London, while I watched Elizabeth the Queen Mother handing out degree certificates to a long line of new graduates, were so utterly monotonous that I didn’t attend my own ceremony the following year.

The Americans don’t in any case wait to become graduates to have a graduation. They graduate at the end of High School. In other words, those who are going on to university, have to graduate to become undergraduates. Well, each to their own I suppose, but I can’t help feeling that a nation whose citizens keep telling me how much more logical their approach to things is than mine (you know, why do we put a ‘u’ in ‘colour’, or how can we play a game like cricket that can last five days and still end in a draw), I find that one a little odd. 

Well, the Spanish have gone further. Far further. They graduate, as Matilda did on 6 June, from Infant School on their way to Primary School. They graduate twelve years before there’s any chance of becoming an undergraduate. 

Still, at least there was nothing in the least bit Queen-Mother-ish, or Albert Hall-ish, about the ceremony. It was all song and dance and celebration. And Matilda, I think I can say in all objectivity and not simply because she’s my granddaughter, danced with more verve, commitment and panache than any of the others. 

They must have worked for hours over many weeks to prepare all the songs. And it all went off without a hitch. The music played the right songs at the right time. The graduating kids sang and danced as rehearsed throughout. And they came up in groups to address the audience at the right moment, saying the right things without a flaw. Matilda made her announcement in English, adding a fine flavour of multiculturalism to an otherwise entirely Spanish hour: ‘thank you for coming,’ she told us all, ‘this is a very special day’.

If I can be allowed a small – perhaps nit-picking – objection, it would be that although it was great idea to put all the kids into identical black tee-shirts, it seems a pity that they were marked ‘we’ve reached the goal’. Personally, I’d like to think that such a bright bunch might well pursue rather higher goals than simply making it into primary education. On the other hand, I don’t want to allow my cynicism to cloud in any way an event that was charmingly marked by joy and enthusiasm.

Matilda, her teacher Alicia, and her certificate

They all got certificates at the end, as is only appropriate, and all received – and in most cases gave – a hug to their teacher.

A quick word for Elliott, too. He was there to support his sister and gave that support unstintingly. What’s more, his behaviour was exemplary, much to his credit.

The same can’t be said about what happened later that day, when the father of another child approached Elliott and me with his son.

‘You hit my son with a stick,’ he accused Elliott.

‘He lied to me,’ Elliott countered.

‘That’s not a good reason to hit him with a stick. You have to apologise.’

Well, Elliott had the grace to apologise and I insisted the two boys shake hands at the end of the process, which was terribly English, I suppose. The other dad insisted that they fist-bump too, which gave it a bit more of an American flavour.

I found the whole event slightly risible. Elliott had actually given me a ‘stick’ to hold for him (there were plenty of sticks around so I have to admit I just threw it in the bushes). I think it was the weapon in question and, to be honest, it barely deserved the term stick. It was more of a large twig with a few side twigs. I don’t quite see how anyone could hurt anyone else with it, especially not with the strength of a four-year-old, even a strong four-year-old. Well, perhaps if they forced the victim to swallow the damn thing, but there’s no suggestion that this is what happened. 

But in any case, I do have a bit of a moral issue with this. Physical violence is, of course, a terrible scourge in the world today. But then so is lying – look at how fake news is undermining our democracies.

With hindsight, I wonder whether the apology was given by the right party in this minor altercation. Which is more serious, a minor blow or a lie? Perhaps it’s the supposed victim who should have apologised to Elliott for his mendacity. Or, at any rate, should they perhaps have apologised to each other?

Still, I don’t want to end this account on a moral quandary. This supposed aggression had occurred at a time when a bunch of kids were spending an afternoon playing together. One was Cora who, you’ll remember, is a little too bossy for Elliott’s taste in a wife. There’s clearly a bond there, however. When we first turned up to drop Matilda off with the group, Elliott was fast asleep in his mum’s arms. When she walked off with him, Cora was distraught, weeping and shouting out her disappointment and anger. 

Fortunately, Elliott’s naps don’t tend to be long, and he didn’t get out of bed the wrong side on this occasion. Cora was soon consoled, no longer distraught (does that make her traught?) and delighted to get the chance to play with him. Indeed, it wasn’t long afterwards that another grandparent approached me to communicate an important moment she’d just witnessed.

‘Elliott has just asked Cora to come with him to Valencia,’ she told me with some delight, ‘and Cora said yes.’

Valencia is, of course, where we live and where the grandkids regularly come to visit us. Not usually with potential life partners, however. 

I’m not quite sure what I should say. Should I encourage this kind of intimacy? Is it OK for a four-year-old boy to have his girlfriend – or at any rate girl friend – holidaying with us such a long way from home? Would it have been better if he’d decided that he did want to marry her and therefore made clear his honourable intentions towards her?

Or would that have made it worse?

The thrills of Easter grandparenting

Ah, Easter, Easter. The great feast of the Christian year. When the followers of Christ eat chocolate to celebrate his sacrifice to redeem mankind from original sin.

As it happens, this year wasn’t just about chocolate. It seems that rocket ships are part of the Easter festivities too. As apparently are games played with Velcro rackets and Velcro balls that stick to them. At least, judging by what the grandkids found when they went looking in the woods for the gifts left for them there by the Easter Bunny (a curious figure for which, in my admittedly rather cursory reading of the New Testament, I’ve not found any scriptural basis).

Even the date on which said hunt in the woods took place was (how shall I put this?) a little unorthodox. I mean, there was a time when the dating of Easter was the kind of question over which accusations of heresy might fly, in circumstances when such accusations could prove seriously career limiting. Terminally career limiting. 

It seems this isn’t a problem in our times when entertaining grandkids of five (Matilda) and three (Elliott, though he was all but four). Church authorities all agree that, however controversial the actual date might be, Easter would always fall on a Sunday. In 2025, however, that was the day their parents would be taking Matilda and Elliott home. So instead we celebrated Easter Wednesday for which, to say the very least, there is no liturgical authority.

The kids had been with us for some days. We’d been to the woods several times, walking the dogs or just playing hide-and-seek. That’s a game they love, though I have to confess I’m still not convinced that Elliott has fully grasped the notion of ‘hiding’.

Matilda counting for hide-and-seek

Elliott still needs to do some work
on the notion of being ‘hidden’

While in the woods, whenever we reached the place where the Easter Bunny had done its work in previous years, Matilda would explain to me that ‘this is where we’ll be looking for the Easter Eggs’. Indeed, on the Tuesday she even explained to me that it was where we’d be looking for the eggs ‘tomorrow’.

Old traditionalist that I am, I patiently and, I hope, compassionately, explained, ‘no, it can’t be tomorrow. Don’t you mean Sunday?’

‘No, it’s tomorrow. Mummy and Mamama said so.’

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with a decision backed up with the authority of a mother and a Mamama (the usual name for grandmothers in Danielle’s native Alsace) and, indeed, it turned out that Matilda was right. The very next day, the annual mystery repeated itself. Mummy and Mamama disappeared into the woods and, coincidentally, it was during that brief disappearance that the Bunny did its work. They must have been keeping that busy rabbit under close observation because they phoned to tell me its work was done the very moment it was.

Out we went, the eager search party, ready to find treasure. And boy were expectations fulfilled. There was lots of chocolate, most of it apparently Swiss, another one of those curious coincidences because Danielle (Mamama) had been to Switzerland only the previous week. 

Matilda, Elliott and Mamama hunting for Easter eggs
Elliott’s holding the Easter rocket toy

It was there that we also found the rocket toy I mentioned before (in the photo, Elliott’s holding it upside down, a stance with which I imagine Elon Musk would seriously disagree). Not far away was the Velcro racket and ball set. 

The Hello Easter book

Also in the vicinity was an Easter book, with the proud title ‘Hello Easter’ in English, a thoughtful gesture by the Easter bunny, given that the hunt was taking place in Spain. As it happens, Elliott and Matilda are equally at home in Spanish, but we like to think of our family – their family – as being primarily English-speaking, so it was good of the bunny to provide the book in that language.

Max ‘helping’ with the Easter egg hunt

I was also pleased to see that Max, our Podenco dog, got into the mood of things, wandering around with the kids on their search. Although I can’t swear that this actually provided what you could strictly call help, at least in terms of finding eggs or toys, it was a great way of confirming the continued improvement of relations between him and the grandkids. You may remember that when he first joined us, his apparent disquiet with them, sometimes leading to rather sinister growling, had made us wonder whether we could keep him at all. It’s wonderful to see how well they’re all getting on now: Matilda and Elliott have taken to giving Max treats (just for the record, let me quickly add that they give them to Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, too). They even like to keep Max supplied with food or water, a task they undertake with great dedication. That, you can imagine, is a sure way of winning a dog’s deep attachment.

Matilda providing Max with water

Elliott too has made a friend of Max

Just to wrap up their stay with us, we even took the kids to the beach the day before they left. It was April and a little cold for swimming. Elliott, however, was happy to wander into the water at least up to his knees, as long as he could keep a firm hold of Granddad’s hand. He also returned to his earlier pastime of trying to transfer sand from the beach to the sea as though, like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, he was inclined to weep ‘to see such quantities of sand’, and felt like them that ‘if this were only swept away, it would be grand’. 

Elliott happy to take to the water
as long as he had hold of a hand

Elliott transferring the beach to the sea

Matilda transferring water to the beach

What’s more, there was a good stiff breeze, and that provided plenty of fun, since we’d brought kites for both grandkids.

Let's go fly a kite: Matilda leads the way

All in all, I’d say, the day went well and provided a fitting conclusion to a highly successful visit.

Sheena (‘Mummy’) has also been
adopted by the dogs (Luci here)

Grandparenting a philosopher and a budding secret agent

Last week, spent with the grandkids, was as much of an eye-opener as my time with them always is.

I enjoyed watching Elliott, now soon to turn four, working on his skills at hide and seek. It’s particularly amusing in the kids’ bedroom hiding from their dad, my son Nicky. Matilda is effective at this, as she crawls under the bed or into some such well-protected place. Elliott, on the other hand, just moves beyond bits of furniture but without hiding behind them. So the furniture becomes a series of obstacles to get to him but doesn’t prevent anyone seeing him. In fact, he’s in full view, if inconvenient to reach. 

Elliott hidden in plain sight
Perhaps a tad too visible?

This reveals one of two things. Maybe he needs to think a little harder about the notion of ‘hiding’, perhaps considering that it means moving to a place where you can’t be seen. On the other hand, however, he’s possibly revealing a remarkable sophistication in one so young and beginning to work on the paradoxical concept, particularly developed by secret agents, that there’s no better place to hide a thing, or oneself, than in plain sight. 

I admit, though, that if this is the case, it still means that he needs to refine his approach a little – perhaps hiding in plain sight doesn’t work all that well when you’re the only person visible and you’re hiding from your dad – but even so, I reckon that his willingness to handle such challenging notions at all, shows remarkable precocity.

The most striking aspect of my visit concerned none of this, however, but Matilda’s ever-deepening exploration of philosophy.

The outstanding sixteenth-century French philosopher Montaigne once wrote that to do philosophy is to learn to die. I mentioned before that the kids have become aware of death, even to the point of understanding that they too have an ultimate appointment with the grim reaper.

Matilda is coming to terms with all this. By no means with casual acceptance. In fact, she seems to share Dylan Thomas’s view, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

‘Mummy,’ she recently told Sheena, ‘I’m mad at you because I didn’t want to be born, because I don’t want to die.’

Yes. It’s the great predicament of humanity, or any species that is aware of death. Even an otherwise rather inferior novel I recently read referred to it. A character announced that no one deserves to be born, but once born, no one deserves to die.

Ours is a cruel and incomprehensible destiny. 

    Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
    Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing 

wrote Edward Fitzgerald in his extremely loose but brilliant translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 

Since our fate makes no sense, it’s up to us to try to find some sense in it. It seems that Matilda’s working on that too.

‘We’re born to get our turn at life,’ she recently announced, ‘and when we die, we let other people have their turn.’

Once we’d absorbed this pronouncement, she asked us whether we perhaps get another turn later. Sheena tried to provide some comfort by explaining that there are people who believe in reincarnation. I said nothing, because I don’t think there’s any comfort for what strikes me as the fundamental discomfort of being.

Fortunately, not every moment of the visit was quite that profound or challenging to the soul. I was mainly there to help get the kids to school, pick them up again and entertain them some of the time. This was to allow Sheena to visit her own family in Belfast without Nicky having to take a whole week off work.

Entertaining Elliott and Matilda:
enjoying the river made in the park by three weeks of rain,
where no river existed before

Entertaining the kids:
when all else failed, watching The Lion Guard for the nth time,
where n is a large positive integer

Entertaining the kids:
Daddy did his bit whenever he had the time

Now I have to say that I’m not a natural when it comes to looking after young kids. I tend to be impatient. I don’t always exercise the level of control I should. Elliott rather proved that point on this trip by ignoring my plea not to cross a road on his own. He ran across in front of a bunch of cars and then, having reached the other side, turned around and ran back. He emerged from the experience unhurt, I’m glad to say, and entirely unruffled, but I was left a nervous wreck.

Because none of this comes naturally to me, I find myself constantly trying to find ways to amuse the kids when I’m out with them. Take the walk to school, for instance. There’s a last steep climb up a hill to reach the school grounds. Each time we got there, I would push the kids up, or for variety, pull them up, making heavy weather of the exercise, panting loudly and stopping from time to time as if to get my breath back. This was deemed to be high comedy.

The last hill to school
Where a granddad to push or pull comes in useful

The best occasion, though, was the morning we walked to school with each of them holding one of my hands. This meant we formed a unit too wide for the pavement (OK, OK, transatlantic friends: the sidewalk). The solution, whenever we reached one of the (adult-)waist-high bollards that line the pavement, was that one child or the other (depending on which side of the street we were on) would pass to the outside of the bollard while I lifted our conjoined hands over the obstacle. This, it turns out, was highly enjoyable (I confess that even I found it fun). To enhance the enjoyment, I accompanied the action with a sound effect – ‘wheeee-yoop’ – each time. Both the action and the sound were well received.

Even better were the moments when we hit (in my case literally) a lamppost or signpost. I’d walk into it. Then we’d go through a pantomime of stepping backwards and working our way round the obstacle till we could walk on without letting go of our hands. This wasn’t just amusing, it was, apparently, hilarious.

‘It’s such fun going to school like this,’ Matilda told me.

I’m sure you can imagine what a joy it was to me, diffident as I am about my ability to look after the kids, to hear such high praise.

It leaves me quite optimistic. I tend to get on better with kids as they get older. If I can amuse them now, who knows what might not be possible later?

Grandparenting: on life and death, on myths and art, on grateful dogs and kids with presents

Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, has developed an ability to come up with startling statements.

To be fair, and just to maintain the character of this series of posts as a true chronicle of our grandparenting experience, I should mention that she's not my only granddaughter. I have another but she, Aya, is twenty now. In my book, that means she's no longer a grandkid but a grandadult.

What's more, I have to confess to a bit of a gap in this chronicle of mine. We saw a lot of the grandkids last year but I failed to keep a proper record of their visits (or our visits to them). There were, however, some memorable moments.

There was Matilda's visit to us during which, as well as the many other activities we organised for her, she attended a horse riding class. It was a pleasure to see her again when her class crossed the road in front of me as I was driving to a supermarket soon after dropping her off.

A diminutive Matilda crossing in front of me with her riding class

Then there was the time when we and the grandkids’ family travelled independently to Ireland, to meet up in Donegal. That’s the county in the Irish Republic, sometimes referred to as Southern Ireland, that extends further north than the six counties still in the United Kingdom, often called Northern Ireland. Still, there are so many ironies in Irish history that the fact that the South extends further north than the North, barely registers.

Matilda and Elliott on a beach in Donegal

Elliott in the Emerald Isle

Matilda ditto

They came to see us in La Cañada early in August. We provided presents, of course (grandparent-esse oblige), and to make them more fun, we had the kids look for them in the woods.

Present hunt in the woods

Then I visited Elliott and Matilda in their home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid, later the same month. It was fiesta time in the village and there was plenty to entertain the kids. The activity that looms largest in my memory, perhaps because it was practically daily, was face painting.

Getting their faces painted during the Hoyo Fiesta

In October, they came to us to celebrate Halloween.

Matilda and Elliott enjoying Halloween
with their mother and grandmother

It was during a summer visit to us that Matilda came up with one of her startling statements. It seems that she and Elliott had discovered death. Obviously, that’s a traumatic event in any child’s life. It was in mine, I know. I don’t remember the exact moment but I do remember the horror with which I realised that my parents would die. And then it dawned on me that it was going to be my fate too, a discovery that struck me then as deeply annoying, as it still does today.

Matilda felt it was important to explain what this all meant.

‘When I’m older,’ she assured Danielle and me with earnestness, ‘you’ll be dead.’

Elliott (aged three) was of the same opinion. 

‘Yes,’ he confirmed, ‘you’ll be dead when we’re older.’

Well, they got no argument from us. That’s how we hope, and expect, things to go. 

Elliott is also good at producing breathtaking statements. Out for a walk with me, he pointed to what looked to me like a length of black plastic tubing discarded by someone on the street. Elliott saw it in a much more interesting way:

‘Look! It’s the frame of a rainbow.’

When a rainbow’s frame falls to earth
Like me you saw something duller? 
Time to break with prosaic realism

After all those exciting visits in 2024, the kids came back to us, with Nicky, their dad, in the week before Twelfth Night. That’s 6 January, an important date in Spain, since there are more presents for children at this, the Feast of the (Three) Kings. That was important for Matilda and Elliott, since they’d spent Christmas in Belfast, with their other grandmother, and they naturally needed gifts from us too. Or rather from the Kings, or perhaps I should say Reyes, this being Spain, after receiving what Santa had for them in Northern Ireland. 

Opening Reyes presents

When I say ‘Christmas’ I’m using the word deliberately, not just being non-woke and failing to describe the season in specifically non-specific religious terms. They were in Belfast explicitly for a Christmas celebration. It apparently went well, but left some important questions in Matilda’s mind. Sitting in our house and looking at the fire burning in the grate, she asked me:

‘How does Santa get down the chimney if there’s a fire burning?’

Well, I know that Nicky doesn’t particularly approve of maintaining the Christmas story for the kids. But far be it from me, I thought, to incur the wrath of Sheena, their mother, by undermining it.

‘Well…’ I said doubtfully, until inspiration came to me, ‘you have to make sure that the fire’s out on Christmas Eve. Otherwise Santa gets pretty annoyed and he comes to the front door to ring the bell, which wakes us up, and then he tells us off for not leaving the chimney ready for him to come down. Which is even more annoying for us as it is for him.’

I thought it was a pretty good explanation, but I have to say that Matilda looked at me quizzically, as though she wasn’t sure it really stood up. But she (and Elliott) have decided long ago that Granddad was silly (the silliest Granddad in the world, in fact), and she clearly felt that there was little purpose in pressing the point with anyone in that sad state. She dropped the subject.

One of the things that Matilda has decided she likes is foot massages. It took her a while to convince herself that if she put a foot of hers into my care, I wouldn’t just tickle it, but since she’s decided that she could trust me on that, she’s started not just waiting for a massage, but demanding one even if I’ve not offered it. That seems to be a genetic disposition. It’s something Danielle expects as a matter of course if we’re watching TV, and Sheena tells me she enjoys foot massages too and doesn’t get half as many as she’d like. Personally, nothing could persuade me to undergo one, but clearly there is an inherited predilection in their favour running down the female line of the family.

A development milestone it’s my pleasant duty to record here is Matilda’s progress in art. In the summer, she did a fine Etch-A-Sketch of a house. Now, most kids, including me in my own childhood, draw houses with a chimney, a door and two windows. Matilda went deeper into her picture. Deeper into the house, in fact. She left out the purely superficial features, such as doors and windows, to show us the bed inside. There’s a pillow on it too, and possibly the suggestion of a head on the pillow. Either way, what she seems to have produced is a sketch not so much of a house, as of a home. 

A bed inside the house? That makes it a home

That impressed me. Just like Elliott’s identification of the frame of a rainbow, a fine example of an artist's view of life. So much more interesting than a mere scientist's.

More recently, Matilda’s turned to portraits. She even did one of me. I know that it could be argued that she has perhaps marginally exaggerated the extent to which I can be regarded as slim. And I suppose, if we’re picky, it could be said that she needs to work a little more on getting a likeness absolutely spot on, but hey, when you’re five, you’ve got plenty of time to do that work. In any case, as she pointed out, she gave me a beard which is an important feature of the likeness.

Portrait by Matilda alongside a more photographic treatment

Incidentally, talking about that beard, in the summer she pronounced it irritating, and I dutifully shaved. I kept shaving for some weeks but the daily process started to get on my nerves, especially as I kept cutting myself. So eventually I let the beard grow back and, as the portrait shows, Matilda has accepted it.

That’s a win-win, I’d say.

In passing, let me say that I like the way she’s put a Spanish N with a tilde above it – what they call an ‘enye’ out here – in the label ‘Grañddad’. True, a pedant would argue that it isn’t right. But I like the way it underlines the fact that she was born in Spain and it’s her home. The enye’s a subtle wink to her Spanish-ness.

Max (left); larger and more intimidating than Toffee and Luci

One of the best things about the grandkids’ most recent visit to us is that Max, our largish dog (as opposed to Luci and Toffee, our toy poodles) who seemed somewhat ill-disposed towards Matilda and Elliott initially, now seems to have adapted to them completely. It no doubt helps that they both now give him treats from time to time. On one occasion when Matilda had given him one, I explained to her that the appreciative look he was giving her was his way of saying ‘thank you, Matilda’.

‘You’re welcome, Max,’ she solemnly told him.

Another high point of their visit was when the kids burst into our bedroom early one morning, when Danielle and I were fondly imagining we might get a lie in. They made a bee line for me.

‘You’re always up early,’ Matilda told me.

‘So you can take us downstairs,’ Elliott concluded for her.

So, of course, I did.

What does a clueless granddad need?

In my experience nothing helps a clueless granddad as much as a bright granddaughter. Matilda may only be five but she’s bright enough to be a lot better informed than he is, and highly responsible with it. That’s responsible enough to take things in hand when her granddad gets them wrong.

Bright girl in bright surroundings,
on a visit to us earlier this month

My problem is that I hadn’t been to the grandkids’ place for several months. Not since August, in fact. I mean, I’ve seen them several times in between, but always at our place. Now, in January, I'm on my first visit since last summer to theirs, making it the first time I’ve been here since Elliott started attending the school where Matilda is already in her third year.

Now one of the chief responsibilities I take on when I visit is walking them to school each day. I fetch them after school too, but that’s less of a problem: heading home’s easy since I know where we’re going.

The trouble with going to school is that the arrangements for dropping off kids keep changing. That’s partly because the kids themselves get older, partly just because the school, in what I presume we have to regard as its wisdom, decides that previously perfectly workable systems need to be changed for something they feel, for no reason that I can fathom, would work better.

Also, when I say that I walk them to school, you should understand that I’m the one that always walks. When it’s chucking it down, we all walk, just because you can do that under an umbrella, which is hard on a bike. If the weather’s good, they cycle and I walk along behind them, getting out of breath on steeper climbs, either because they zap up them more quickly than I’m comfortable with, or because Elliott has decided that he’s had enough of pedalling uphill and wants me to push him.

Anyway, on Monday of this visit we decided that we could probably take bikes. It turned out to be a mistake. When I picked the kids up in the afternoon, I was told that cycling through such a downpour had left the authorities no choice but to change their trousers since the ones they’d arrived in were soaked. 

Still, we got to school safely and in one piece (each). I’d been given clear instructions about what to do with the bikes. I was pleased to see that Matilda stood by my side while I was locking them up, making sure I did it right. I was less pleased when she then vanished. No one had told me that she knew the way to her classroom and took pride in getting there unaccompanied. 

Then I had to deal with Elliott. That’s when I discovered that the kids didn’t enter their school building through the front door anymore. I mean, why would they? Why use what’s obviously an entrance door when you can fool the clueless granddad by going up that little path there, to the right of the building, leading to the playground behind it, and go in through the back door? I mean, why wouldn’t you go for that arrangement?

Well, I could see that the front door was locked. Then I saw Elliott going up the path to the right of the building. He turned around, and gave me one of his most charming smiles, waved and strode on confidently. Since I still hadn’t got my mind around the vanishing Matilda mystery, I waved back and kept looking for her.

It was only in the afternoon that I discovered what had happened. Matilda hadn’t gone straight to her classroom, which was just as well. She saw Elliott, took his hand and led him to his teacher herself, explaining – very maturely I’m sure – what had happened. The teacher apparently thanked her and took charge of Elliott, saving me my blushes. 

And leaving me both relieved and grateful.

P.S. That rain: 

Matilda and Elliott live in a village up in the hills above Madrid. At a good height, as it happens, 1000 metres above sea level. And that’s taught me one thing at least: whoever came up with the idea that the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain had no idea what he was talking about. More clueless than Matilda and Elliott’s granddad.

The rain in Spain gets everywhere, it’s plain

P.P.S. The best or the worst? 

Elliott is someone whose views are firmly held. Which doesn’t mean they don’t change. On the contrary, they can swing violently, through 180 degrees depending on circumstances, actions (mostly mine) and mood (mostly his). I once listened to Ronnie Scott doing a standup session at his eponymous jazz club in London and he told us at one point that, while we may not be the best audience in the world, we were certainly the worst. Well, this week Elliott has solemnly informed me that I was the best granddad in the world and a surprisingly short time later, that I was the worst (well, strictly speaking, the baddest). I put this to the test at one point, asking him, ‘who’s the best granddad in the world?’. 

‘You,’ he replied unhesitatingly and with complete conviction.

‘And who’s the baddest granddad in the world?’ I went on.

‘You,’ he replied with as little hesitation and equal firmness.

Ah, well. I’ve never liked mediocrity. Being both the best and the baddest? That strikes me as a great improvement over being merely average.

Elliott, equally bright, and with good answers

Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me