Grandparenting: 'why?' questions and a strong silent type

After a thirsty outing on their motorbikes
Matilda and Elliott share some refreshment

The ‘why?’ phase is a rich moment in a child’s development, as I rediscovered on my most recent grandparenting escapade.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my father’s lap for a long conversation in which I said little more than “why?”.

“Why don’t planes fall out of the sky, Daddy?”

“Because the air keeps them up there.”

“Why?”

“Because the wing’s shape keeps the pressure below it higher than above it.”

“Why is it higher?”

The conversation went on for ages until eventually my father just laughed and said, “you’ve got really good at ‘why?’ questions, haven’t you?”

If I didn’t answer, “why do you say that?”, I wish I had.

Now it’s Matilda who, at three and a half, has become a dab hand at ‘why?’ questions. That was clear when I took her for a walk in her pram despite her having made it perfectly plain, so plain that no one within half a kilometre’s range could possibly be in any doubt about the matter – she has excellent lungs – that she didn’t want to go.

The Spanish are good at being discreet, but unfortunately the way they were looking away from the grandfather with the wailing child made it so clear they felt discretion necessary, that it did nothing to make me more comfortable. 

“I want my Mummy,” Matilda informed me when she decided to switch from inarticulate wailing to a more articulate variety.

“I’m afraid she’s away.”

“Why?”

“Because she had to go on a trip for work.”

“Why does she have to work?”

“Because if your Mummy and Daddy don’t work, there won’t be enough money for you to have a nice home, enough food and the toys you want.”

“Why?”

I was clearly being driven down the same endless path as I’d once forced my father to take. I tried to change the subject.

“Anyway, we’re having a lovely walk. Look at the colour of the sunset. Look at all the lovely trees.”

“I don’t want a walk.”

I had a flash of inspiration. A rational conversation based on interchanges of ‘why?’ questions and ‘because’ answers wasn’t, it was becoming clear, going to get me anywhere. So I decided this was the time to present her with a simple statement of fact, the kind that allows of no alternative.

“Well, we’re on a walk and that’s all there is to it,” I assured her in what I hoped was a tone of utter finality.

To my astonishment this was greeted with a moment of silence. And a sudden transformation of mood. She sat up and looked at where we were and where we were going.

“Why have you turned around?” she asked. But in a completely different tone, one of interest and, potentially, even pleasure, rather than wailing complaint. She even had the beginnings of a smile.

“Because I thought it would be fun to go down to the backstreets to head back home, rather than just go the same way we came out.”

“But this isn’t the way home.”

“It’s a different way. Look, you can see the houses of the village, and your home is behind them.” 

To match deeds to words, I turned the pram around so that she could see the direction I was pointing. To my immense satisfaction she looked, nodded and seemed satisfied. The smile was no longer just a beginning.

The crying had gone on for nearly quarter of an hour. But the walk lasted an hour and for the rest of it, Matilda was charm itself. Smiling, jokey (she’d lower the shade on her blind and then raise it again in a peekaboo game), simply fun. We talked about the wonderful houses we were going past, the fine trees, the herd of sheep. No subject was too trivial or too complex. And there was no lack of subjects.

Matilda playing with the shade on her pram

It was an immensely satisfying experience. And deeply instructive. It taught me something I already knew about adults. Reasoning may get you nowhere, but a truth that can’t be changed is likely to gain acceptance, or at least resignation. Once resigned, a person is much more amenable to moving on and finding different pleasures, to replace the ones they were previously so upset about missing.

It seems the same applies to kids.

And what about Elliott? 

He too is making fine linguistic progress as he approaches his second birthday. One important breakthrough has been his mastery of the word ‘no’ and another his skilful deployment of ‘and me?’.

‘No’ can get awkward. Standing on a pavement with him one day, with only uphill or down as available directions, I found him answering ‘no’ to both questions “shall we go this way?” followed by “shall we go the other way, then?”. That, I suppose logically, left us rather stuck and going nowhere at all for a while. Fortunately, he made up his mind without further consultation and simply started walking in one of the directions while I, as is often the case when walking with him, was reduced to merely following in his wake. 

It was interesting that the final decision was wordless. I think I’m alone in persisting in the belief that he’s a strong silent type, but every now and then he provides me with powerful confirmation of that judgement.

‘And me?’ is proving immensely useful. Matilda gets something desirable. “And me?” says Elliott and, boy, there’s no way I can resist giving him the same.

That proved a problem when I only discovered, after I’d given Matilda the strawberry yoghurt she’d asked for, that it was the last. That led to an outbreak of strong-but-not-silent-type behaviour. Fortunately, some yoghurt mixed with blueberries helped calm the storm. 

Talking about calm, we had an excellent dose of that restful quality when I took him out for a ride on his fine, plastic, foot-powered motorbike. For the first twenty-five minutes he said not a word. But whenever I called out to him with an instruction – “stop there, Elliott”, “let’s go this way”, or “wait for me at the kerb” – he’d turn and look at me with wide eyes (and he's really good at opening his eyes wide) before quietly doing as I asked without a word of complaint.

Elliott: a daredevil but disciplined biker

Even for the last five minutes, when he started talking again, it was sounds of satisfaction and the occasional ‘OK’, the positive alternative to the ‘No’ he has already mastered so entirely. Overall, it was pleasantly easy to be out with him and unexpectedly quiet. 

Strong, silent type, you see.

Now he just has to learn to stop throwing his plate, strongly and silently, on the floor after he’s eaten as much of its contents as he wants. Because I’m tired of clearing it up. Something I do strongly but, I can assure you, not at all silently.

Oh, and there’s one more instance of his linguistic mastery which is worth recording, though it may be apocryphal. Apparently, the night his mother Sheena returned from a business trip – helping his dad, Nicky, while she was away was my main reason for being there – he told her twice, as soon as he was happily ensconced next to her in bed (an exceptional privilege these days that he’s learned to sleep in his own cot), “Mummy, don’t do that”.

Or at least that’s what she thought he said. She now wonders whether it’s a false memory because he hasn’t said it since. But I think this happens with kids: they come out with something once and then not again for ages, but not because they can’t, only because there’s no need while the same circumstances don’t arise.

After all, here was a strong silent type snuggling down comfortably next to his mum. Now he just wants to get to sleep. How irritating if she makes a fuss of him and keeps him awake. What would you expect him to say, other than “Mummy, don’t do that”? But why would he say it again later?

OK, so the concrete slope was built to skate down
But, hey, what’s to stop daredevils using it as a slide?

Bad language

One factor that militates against my hopes for harmony, rather than conflict, among nations, is the way one group will insult another, which flings the same insults back at the first. 

Exploring this exciting subject is one of the great benefits of learning languages.

When I was studying Italian at college, I was told about a fellow student who’d just completed a PhD thesis about a region in the Italian Alps. Two valleys ran together at a small market town, the only point where the inhabitants of two villages, one up each valley, would meet when they came to sell their produce. At all other times, a spur of the mountains kept them firmly and practically insurmountably separated, even though they were only a couple of kilometres apart as the crow flies. 

If a crow could be persuaded to fly over that mountain.

He found that each spoke its own version of Italian. For instance, the modern definite article in Italian comes from the Latin for ‘that’, ‘illum’ in the masculine (OK, OK, I know that’s the accusative of ‘ille’, but the accusative is the root of the modern forms). Each syllable of the word has given an alternative form of the masculine definite article, ‘il’ and ‘lo’. In one of the villages, the ‘il’ form was used, in the other the ‘lo’.

What’s more, he also found that each village had a way of describing someone as completely mad, or possibly stupid, or even both. And, inevitably, that way was to say that they were like somebody from the other village.

While I was studying French, I was amused to discover that the French referred to what most countries now simply call condoms as ‘capotes anglaises’, ‘English overcoats’. The English, on the other hand, called them ‘French letters’. They are, or at least were, somehow disreputable, so each of the two countries liked to present them as foreign in their origins and, why not, place those origins in the other. 

Many years later, I did some research into one particular Frenchman, a scientist by the name of Maupertuis. I read a colossal number of his letters. I learned to recognise his handwriting without having to read his signature, and that was an extraordinary feeling: I felt I knew him with some intimacy even though he’d been dead for over 200 years.

As I was ploughing through those letters, I came across two that struck me as odd. He’d written them to a fellow scientist in England, a leading member of the Royal Society. “Thank you for the gift”, Maupertuis wrote. “I gave half to le Président Hénault,” a friend of his, “although I have far more need of them than he does.” And, he explained, that it was galling to have to turn to foreigners for the means to “protect our honour from the perils to which our beautiful women expose us”.

Suddenly I realised why it was the English called condoms French letters: it was because the French wrote letters to ask for them, and the English used letters to send them. Contraception was illegal throughout Christian Europe, but  Protestant countries were more inclined than Catholic ones to turn a blind eye to its use. Another researcher had looked into baptismal records from the Protestant Swiss canton of Geneva, and found that you could see families in which there would be a child, and a year or two later a second, and a year or two after that a third, and then no more. Clearly, some kind of family planning was taking place and I doubt very much that in many cases it was abstinence.

And ‘English overcoats’? It seems a good name for protectives “of our honour” that arrive from England. Not a bad euphemism at all.

All this came to mind the other day when I wandered into a bakery in the little town of Hoyo de Manzanares in the hills above Madrid, where I’m spending a few days helping to look after two of my grandchildren (more of that in another post). I hadn’t seen the baker for some time and asked her how she was doing, and in particular how things had worked out with the assistant I’d seen working there in the autumn.

“Se despidió a la francesa,” she told me. 

That literally means “he took French leave”. It’s the expression for leaving sneakily without any kind of farewell. “As soon as the meeting was over, I took French leave,” means that I got out after the discussion ended without saying goodbye to anyone.

Interestingly, the French equivalent is “filer à l’anglaise”. Literally that’s “rushing off in the English way”. Another fine example of different nations attributing something negative, in this instance bad manners, to others.

Despedirse a la francesa
Filer à l'anglaise
or... to take French leave 

Still, at least in this case the English can count on the support of the Spanish. It seems the French are outvoted two-to-one. A much-needed victory for the English in today’s Brexit times.

All the more so after the French recently came over and delivered an all-time record-breaking defeat, 53-10, to England’s rugby team at its headquarters and high temple, Twickenham.

Still. I’m a keen fan of harmony among nations. So there’s no way you’ll catch me saying that this was typical French callousness towards an opponent already down on its luck.

I’ll just say that we got royally screwed, if you’ll excuse my French.

Grandparenting cancels Father's day

It’s Father’s Day, here in Spain, and I’m on a train towards Madrid to spend a few days with the grandkids, Matilda and Elliott, who live in the hills above the city. 

Not that Father’s Day applies to me. Apparently. Matilda and Elliott’s father, Nicky, my dedicated and supportive son, went to some lengths to explain to me that once you’ve become a grandfather, you lose the rights of a father. It seems the two statuses are mutually incompatible, like being a professional or an amateur sportsman: turn professional and you lose your amateur status.

So I’m facing a curious reversal of roles: today, I have to treat my son as a father, and indeed give him the consideration appropriate for Father’s Day. As a mere grandfather, I’m entitled to no such treatment from my son.

Just as well as I’ve never celebrated Father’s Day in my life.

Fortunately, the grandchildren will make up for all that. Matilda already announced the day before yesterday that she wanted Granddad to come ‘today’ not in two days’ time. As I pointed out in my last grandparenting post, she’s good at the distinction between today and the future. Today, she makes it very clear, is the moment to fulfil her wishes, not some vague date to come.

I’m looking forward to seeing her. It’ll be fun, as it always is. But she also has a more particular need for some additional affection, which I hope I can provide in a grandfatherly way. She’s broken a collarbone. I salute the guts she showed by climbing to the top of a large rock in a park near her home, but I lament the misfortune that led to her falling back down it, and which has left her with a broken clavicle and her right arm in a sling.

Matilda with her sling

As for Elliott, I’m looking forward to having some more conversation with him. 

He’s easy to talk to. Above all, he’s easy to amuse. In our video calls, I’ve taken to roaring at him from time to time. The effect is always to produce a beaming and seductive smile.

He has recently begun roaring back at me. But, without wanting to blow my own trumpet – or my own roar – too much, I think I have the edge on him for now. He can’t produce quite the same volume of deepthroated roar that I can. Not yet, at any rate. But it doesn’t matter, since his roars get me smiling just as warmly as he smiles in response to mine. 

So we have a roaring time.

Elliott in reflective mood
Scouting a new opportunity for mischief perhaps?

And what more do I need to celebrate Father’s Day?

Impartiality? Sure. As long as you’re impartial for us

It’s with some delight that I see Gary Lineker, ex-leading England footballer, returning to the BBC’s Match of the Day programme, on which he was an outstanding presenter and commentator.

Well, I say outstanding. To be honest, it’s been decades since I’ve watched Match of the Day. But people who know about these things tell me he really is outstanding.

Small-boat immigrants in the Channel

He was suspended because he put some tweets up about the UK government’s plans to stop illegal immigrants travelling across the English Channel in small boats. Those plans involve keeping them in centres that have yet to be built before deporting them back to the countries they came from, or to a range of third countries, that have yet to say they’ll take any. Except for Rwanda. It’s prepared to take 200.

For the record, more than 40,000 such immigrants arrived in Britain last year. If I've got the arithmetic right, Rwanda’s generosity represents around 0.5% of the total.

Gary Lineker

Lineker’s tweets compared the government’s language over its proposals to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely wise. There’s a good principle, known as Godwin’s law, that says that the longer an online debate goes on, the closer it gets to a comparison with the Nazis or Adolf Hitler. An often-quoted spin-off rule is that such a comparison should end the debate, and the person who has made it has lost the argument.

Still, the principle behind Lineker’s comment seems entirely justified. Perhaps rather than compare the government’s thinking to Hitler’s, we could compare it to that of other less controversial, more contemporary but still weird figures. Take Matteo Salvini, for instance, who as Interior Minister in Italy, closed the country’s ports to vessels that had rescued immigrants who’d been left drowning in the Mediterranean when the boats carrying them sank.

Presumably he felt that it was better to let people drown than to let them in. 

He also once said that what Italy needed was “a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood”.

It’s hard not to think that he sees certain people as pretty much sub-human. Which is, I think we can agree, more than a little ugly. Without even having to break Godwin’s Law. 

Incidentally, Matteo Salvini has congratulated the British government on its stance on illegal immigration to the country. Which probably tells you as much as you need to know about the policy.

Salvini: indifferent to the suffering of immigrants
and a great fan of the British government approach

In any case, the motivation given by the BBC for Lineker’s suspension, was that it needs to maintain its strict impartiality. Now, I think that’s an important principle. Perhaps, though, the BBC ought to start by setting its own house in order. Its Chairman, Richard Sharp, is a long-time donor to the Conservative Party. He’s also under investigation for having organised a loan for the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at just the time when he was being considered for appointment to the chairmanship. That’s a decision over which the Prime Minister has serious influence.

I don’t know. It may just be me. But that history suggests to me that there’s a much bigger problem of impartiality at the BBC than Lineker. I can’t help feeling that impartiality matters more at the top of the organisation than at the level of a sports presenter.

It’s hard not to feel that there are people out there who think that impartiality is good, but only as long as it’s impartiality for them. Rather like Donald Trump, who’s keen on free speech, as long as it’s freely adoring of him.

In any case, impartiality is most important when it comes to news and current affairs. Football commentating? I’m not sure it matters that much. Besides, Lineker didn’t make his comments on air in his capacity as a BBC presenter, he made them on his private Twitter account. And he isn’t even a BBC employee, but a freelancer.

All this made it heart-warming to see how many of his fellow commentators and presenters on sports programmes supported him by refusing to do their broadcasts. That left the BBC’s sports coverage in tatters over the weekend. Which, no doubt, explains the end of the suspension.

A delight, as I say. Though perhaps more of a relief. At least, for as long as this setback to the Salvini trend in British politics endures.

A great story for International Women's Day. Or not.

The following story struck me as just right for the eighth of March, International Women’s Day.

It’s about a basketball team of fifth grade girls – ten or eleven years old, generally – in the town of Hoover, Alabama. Called the ‘Lady Jags’, they had been practising on municipal basketball courts but were told, it seems, that they couldn’t keep using them (or at least, using them for free) if they didn’t compete in a local league with boys’ teams. 

So they competed.

Well, they didn’t just compete, they won. They came out on top. They were the champions.

And that’s when things turned a little sour.

Because although they won, they were denied the trophy. It was presented, instead, to the boys’ team they’d just beaten. Appalling, right?

Oddly, the Jags are on the official record of the competition as having won, even though they were denied the prize.

Jayme Mashayekh, the mother of one of the girls on the winning team thought this shameful. She posted the story on Facebook, and from there it went viral. Her post included the following sad recrimination:

'Excuse me? What?' What did they do to get disqualified? Did they not pay their dues? Did they not play up a level in competition? Oh, it's because they're GIRLS?!?! So sure enough these 5th grade girls played their hearts out, left it all on the floor and battled their male counterparts only to be told, 'No, I'm sorry you don't count.'

The BBC World News programme The Context invites two guests to sit in on each show and, at the end, turns to them to come up with some curious little story for the day. It was from one such guest that I first heard this story. Now, it’s fashionable to knock the BBC, but I like its journalism, and I feel it takes trouble to check what it broadcasts and apply good standards to its output.

So, I thought this was a wonderful illustration of how, far from achieving the aims of the #metoo campaign, we’re still stuck in #anybodyratherthanus as far as the issues aired on International Women’s day are concerned.

That’s why I thought the story so apt.

But it turns out that things aren’t quite that simple. While the BBC applies professional standards to its journalists, it apparently doesn’t to its guests. There’s more to the tale from Hoover than at first meets the eye.

It seems that the players on the Lady Jag team are carefully selected based on their skill level. The boys’ league is ‘regular’, according to the city authorities. By that I think they mean that teams are open to anyone who is keen to play, and they’ll mix good and weaker players together into teams in a way that avoids getting uniformly strong teams others can’t compete against. The Lady Jags are, by those standards, an ‘elite’ team.

Because they’re a team that’s essentially different from the others, they were told that while they could compete with them, they couldn’t win the trophy even if they won the championship. They knew that all along, the city authorities say. And so does their coach.

Besides, the Lady Jags weren’t the only team that this happened to. Another elite team, this time of boys, also won a championship game. Again, and for the same reason, they were denied a trophy.

The lousy press that the viral story generated led to the mayor of Hoover inviting the Lady Jags to meet the city council. They declined that perhaps slightly too public honour but accepted an invitation to meet the mayor in his office, so he could present them with a trophy of their own and some winners’ medals.

The Lady Jags honoured. Eventually. By the mayor

Honour satisfied. Or at least I like to think it is. I hope the Lady Jags agree.

Still, it strikes me as weird that the situation arose at all. It may be that I’m not being sufficiently imaginative, but it seems to me that no team that is, by its very nature, ruled out of winning a tournament should be allowed to take part.

Or, to put it another way, if you’re allowed into a competition, it must be possible for you to win it. If you play well enough.

Apparently, Hoover is wondering whether that might not be a sensible approach and is considering banning elite teams from regular competitions.

At any rate, whatever else, discovering what really lay behind the story gave me a useful lesson.  If you want to make something of a story, and pass it on, you have to make sure you know it’s true.

Or, to put it another way, the story is less about one of the great problems of our time, the denial of women’s rights, and a great illustration of another, the danger of spreading fake news.

And with that, I just hope that you’re having, or have already enjoyed, an excellent International Women’s Day.

Golden Arches and Darkened Doors

Last week I had a couple of curious experiences. 

The first involved a great transatlantic culinary tradition. The other was enhanced, or more accurately made a little frightening, by thoughts of another, and extraordinary, transatlantic custom.

The first took me down memory lane. 

Ah, nostalgia, nostalgia. It casts a gentle, attractive light over memories, even of things that weren’t that pleasant when we experienced them. That was the case, for instance, of my latest visit to McDonald’s. 

Yes, they of the golden arches.

My sons, to my surprise, gave up on the delights of chain restaurant hamburgers while still young. I don’t think they were even teenagers. Once they no longer wanted to visit these fine establishments, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and brush their dust off my shoes.

Not that I stayed away entirely. I once had a colleague who swore by the delights of ‘Maccy Ds’, as he affectionately called the place. In his case though, it was more as a source of coffee (and secondarily of WiFi) rather than of hamburgers. Offsite meetings with him tended to take place in ‘Maccy Ds’ and that gave me the opportunity to discover that they served coffee which was precisely as much to my taste as were their hamburgers. 

Apart from these unfortunate exposures, I escaped any further contact with McDonald’s for a quarter of a century. But the thing about becoming a grandparent is that it gives you the opportunity to relive some of the best experiences of being a parent. As well as some that are rather less appealing.

Let me say at once that seeing Matilda’s delight in being offered lunch at McDonald’s was pleasant enough to make up for many of the exasperating aspects of being there. She was happy and a three-year-old’s happiness is highly infectious.

There was serious exasperation, however. Indeed, my memories of visits to McDonald's had set the bar fairly low, but somehow the reality of returning to those haunts, contrived to get below it. And the cause of my disappointment? Not the quality of the food, which was exactly as I remembered it. It was the weird slowness of the service. It took us nearly twenty minutes to be served, which was a little tedious, since we’d chosen a fast-food establishment because we were short of time.

I don’t expect fast food to be of outstanding quality. But I do expect it to be fast. Fast food served slowly? Feels like lose-lose.

Fast food served slow? Sounds like a double whammy

The other weird experience of the week came at 11:00 one night. I got an urgent phone call from my wife. A neighbour’s daughter had contacted her in some panic after finding it impossible to get through to her mother, by mobile or by landline, for several hours. Since the daughter lives in Valencia, the best part of half an hour’s drive away, she wondered whether we could call on her mother. Danielle was with our grandkids in the Madrid region, so that had to be me.

Well, there was no answer to the doorbell at her gate. There were no lights on in the house. I decided I was just going to have to go in, something made easy by the fact that we have a set of her keys (as she has a set of ours); unfortunately, the easiness of the task was somewhat reduced by the fact that I had no idea where they were.

Even after I’d rung Danielle back and asked her where the keys were, I had trouble finding them. When I finally did, I had to kick myself for an obvious attack of what she calls ‘testosterone blindness’. They weren’t just visible. In fact, they were blindingly obvious. I had simply failed to see them even when I was looking right at them. That rather proves that looking at things isn’t quite the same as seeing them.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of my problems. There were six keys in the bunch. One of the six had to be for garden gate. Two of the other five had to be for the two locks on the front door. But which ones?

The key question: which is the right one?

It took me a while to find out, fiddling around in the dark and trying different keys in different locks. I had my mobile so I could use its light, but holding a phone in one hand, for the light, while identifying a key in the other, for the lock, isn’t that easy.

As I was searching, and making, I reckoned, quite a racket of it, I heard a snuffling sound from inside the door accompanied by little canine whimpers. It seemed that even if our neighbour hadn’t spotted me, her dogs had.

“Hi, dogs,” I said, to comfort them. That fine novel, A Hundred and One Dalmatians, makes the point that dogs don’t like to be called ‘dog’ but, in my experience, they don’t give a damn. Besides, the snuffling sounds I could hear sounded friendly, with no barking or growling, as I’d expect from dogs that know me.

Eventually, I got the right keys in the right locks and was able to enter the house. That’s when I began to feel some real dread, wondering what I was about to find. A desperately sick neighbour? Perhaps even a dead body? It took me a moment to build up the resolve to step into her sitting room.

And there, to my immense relief, I found a light on and my neighbour, looking acutely frightened but upright and otherwise well, watching with wide eyes this weird intrusion into the privacy of her home. 

“Oh, wow!” I told her, “I’m so pleased to see you well.”

Within minutes we were laughing about the whole experience. Her mobile was on silent and the phone on her landline had simply given up the ghost (she’s bought a new one since). As for the doorbell, she’d been so deeply asleep that she simply hadn’t heard it – it was the dogs that woke her.

I headed home a few minutes later, leaving her already on the phone to her daughter.

So everything worked out fine in the end. Although, when she got home, Danielle did point out how much more ugly things might have been had I been on the other side of the Atlantic.

“Just as well it didn’t happen in the Sates,” she said. “She might have had a gun. An intruder facing a frightened woman with a gun? You could have been dead by now.”

A chilling thought. And here’s my question to any Americans reading this: how would you handle that kind of situation?

Grandparenting: the great experiment

It was the moment for a great experiment.

Matilda came to see us with only her mother, Sheena, in tow. No little brother, our grandson Elliott. No Daddy, our son Nicky.

That was a bit of a breakthrough, with Sheena getting something that has become rare indeed, a morning sleep-in. She even told Nicky as much: “you should also come and stay with your parents with just one kid too – it’s so restful.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. Sheena was going back home to the Madrid region alone, leaving Matilda with us at our home near Valencia, the first time since her conception that she’d spent a night without one or other of her parents. That was going to be our great experiment, testing whether we could take her alone for a more extended period in the summer. And it worked out well.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s plenty to report on in this latest grandparenting experience, aside from the experiment. As there always is in every visit by our grandkids.

Things keep developing, naturally. So when she came out with us on a dog walk (something she only did once on this visit – it’s cold this week and she has more sense), she insisted on walking not just Toffee on her lead, but Luci too. Both dogs at the same time, a milestone passed.

Matilda with both dogs – Luci to the left, Toffee to the right

We returned to the horizontal tree trunk that we’d enjoyed once before, with her brother Elliott, but this time she didn’t just sit on it. This time she had to stand and then fall off. That’s an assisted fall, with a grandparent’s arms to slow it. The difference is that while it still ended with her lying on the ground, she was laughing uproariously at the fun, instead of crying plaintively at any pain.

Matilda ready for another ‘fall’ 

What with the sunset lighting our walk, it was a great time to be in the woods.

A good time to be in the woods

The next day when her granddad made her spaghetti, she and her grandmother decided that this would be an opportunity not to miss, to put the play house in the garden to good use. So it became their impromptu dining room.

Matilda and her grandmother
Lunch in the play house in the garden

As always, I was struck by her growing mastery of language. She’s learning to handle distinctions that escaped her before. A good example is how she now distinguishes ‘today’ from ‘tomorrow’. In a related development, she has also developed a neat indifference to unimportant ambivalences in meaning.

Take the following exchange. I’ll leave you to work out which bits are Matilda talking and which her grandparents.

“I want a biscuit.”

“No. You’ve already had two today. You can have another one tomorrow.”

“No.”

If you’re a smartarse granddad who likes to play on ambiguities, you might decide to treat that as meaning ‘no biscuit’. She, however, has a fine line in quickly disabusing any such granddad of any such delusion.

“Not tomorrow. Today.”

And, in case there’s any weakness in our command of English, she’ll hammer her message home in the language of her teachers, and therefore the language of the authoritative statement, admitting of no lack of clarity, Spanish:

“Hoy.”

Matilda achieving linguistic mastery, you see, and with it masterfulness.

Such amusing activities and observation passed the time until the moment came for Sheena to leave us. That marked the beginning of the experiment.

We took Sheena to the station. She waved us goodbye and headed for her train. Matilda didn’t seem too happy about this development, so Danielle and I resorted to a little bribery, if only to buy time. There was a stand outside the station selling churros, the traditional Spanish pastry and breakfast snack, which can be dipped into melted chocolate to give a distinctive and highly enjoyable meal. 

“Churros, churritos,” Matilda had exclaimed when she saw it. So we got her churros and while they lasted, her mood seemed reasonably good.

Churros bought us a little time

Back in the car, though, there was a reversion to melancholy.

“Mummy! Mummy!” she whimpered.

“We’re going to the zoo,” we assured her. Clearly, that didn't answer her complaint in the least, but then it wasn't intended to: after all, not answering is just what an evasion is for. Apparently, the announcement did at least generate enough interest to comfort her for a while.

At the zoo, seeing the animals was fine, but not what really fascinated her. That was the percussion class, led by an enthusiastic young lady Danielle had worked with before when she decided to try her hand on the drums. Matilda liked her and the drums so much, that she insisted in going twice.

Matilda drumming, assisted by her grandmother

In between, she had her face painted, which she found gratifying too.

Face painting

We saw some animals but, apart from the baby elephant, little seemed to attract her too much.

Back at home, she was so tired that she let herself be led off for her siesta with never a word of complaint. Afterwards, she was fine up to dinner, and again afterwards, until she had to go to bed. That moment, usually spent in company with her mother or father, was pretty well bound to lead to a little homesickness again.

Danielle took her into our bed and lay with her in it for nearly an hour. By then she was calm enough and comfortable enough to go to her own bed again.

The next morning was a little stressful for her. We’d promised her that she would be catching a train and travelling back to her parents, and that her mummy would be at the station in Madrid to meet her. That made it impossible for her to focus on anything else. She had her shoes on by 8:30, insisting she wanted to go to the station, though there were three and a quarter hours to wait still.

“But the train isn’t there,” we tried to convince her, “there’d be no point in going yet.”

She looked at us with wide eyes. I think she believed us. But that didn’t shake her resolve not to do anything else while waiting for the time to pass.

“Let’s go and say goodbye to your playground,” I suggested.

“Say goodbye to the playground…,” she wondered, “yes, let’s go.”

I thought we’d made a breakthrough. I got her into her coat and mittens. But then, just as we were about to go, she changed her mind.

“Don’t want to go to the playground,” she announced, “don’t want to say goodbye.”

So we spent the last couple of hours waiting for the time to go by. For most of the wait, Matilda was in shoes, mittens and coat, ready to leave.

Finally, the slow-crawling clock hands came around to the appropriate time. Indeed, our slowness getting out of the house left us, after waiting so long, having to hurry a bit to get to the station on time. But we made it.

Matilda and Danielle ready to board the train

Danielle and Matilda went wandering down the station platform. The ticket collector kindly let me through too, though I wasn’t travelling, so I could help with the luggage. Once they were settled and on their way, I headed home.

Danielle and Matilda ready for the train to leave

I’m told that Matilda’s Mummy was at the station in Madrid to meet her, along with her big uncle David. The greetings were loud and joyful. Matilda was happy again.

Still, Danielle, Sheena and I all agreed that the experiment hadn’t gone at all badly. The tears had been few, the amusement considerable. We were ready to take her for a while longer when the summer comes around.

An experiment with some difficult moments, therefore, but overall one that unquestionably achieved its goals.