I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway.
However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it is to take your grandchild to the zoo, as he had recently done.
Of course, the first goes without saying — though I was surprised to hear this vast repository of conservatism applauded. The second I would have dismissed as sentimental twaddle up to about 19 months ago, when my first grandchild, Oscar, was born. But I’m so ludicrously besotted by my grandson now that my boy looks at me askance. Not the least odd thing about the strange business is that Oscar returns his grandfather’s love no less passionately. It was almost disappointing to find Tony Robinson and I have so much in common.
When I go round to see Oscar, we have a little routine going. I hoist him up into my arms and we check the lampshades for resting flies. If we find one — it’s usually the same fruit fly — he pokes it into life with his forefinger. We’ve been persecuting this one individual like this for weeks. Oscar and I can be as excited about hunting fruit flies as people used to be about hunting tigers.
There’s no garden to play in; he’s largely confined to this upper-storey room. But the view from the window across the treetops to the green fields beyond, and beyond that the river, is full of interest. So next we go and stand at the window to look out and discover what we can see.
In a field about a mile away there is sometimes a small herd of brown cows. We look for these cows first. They are very small indeed at that distance — no bigger than fruit flies — but if they are in view we are tremendously happy and we welcome them with lowing noises. Imitating a cow calling anxiously for her calf is one of my main accomplishments.
One day I came to my senses. If this captivating little chap can glean so much pleasure from looking at a cow from a mile away, how much more thrilling it would be for him to go to a zoo and see a rhinoceros from ten feet. So that’s what we did. His Mum came too. She was 38 weeks pregnant (now 39) and enormous. She hoped that the exertion of walking around a zoo would make the baby come. This will be her fifth. She is the only woman I’ve known who says she enjoys giving birth. She’s only 26 years old, and still thin, but her belly was so big that other women stared. I got funny looks, too, mainly from literal-minded people who assumed that her space-hopper belly must have been my doing.
The biggest revelation to Oscar were the fish. He’d not seen fish before. There were fish in the shallows of the lake and in various concrete ponds. After the fish he was most fascinated by the seagulls and then by the poisonous tree frogs. Astonishing colours, those tree frogs. But he’s been in favour of frogs ever since we read the story of Jeremy Fisher.
The moment I carried Oscar into the rhinoceros house and stood him on the wooden top rail not ten feet from a ton and a half of black rhino chewing hay wasn’t, however, the epiphany I had imagined it might be. Oscar silently contemplated it for while and then we made it an honorary cow and mooed encouragingly at it. Tiny eyes, rhinos have. This one’s swivelled nervously at us as he chewed. And then Oscar agitated to climb down because he would rather look at the fish in the pond by the door.
Yes, I hate to say it, but Red Tony was absolutely right. What a day we had! Simple pleasures. Family pleasures. You can’t beat them. The sun shone. The lions looked regal, the baboons philosophical, and the two ladies selling ice creams were cheerful without being demented. Only the giant tortoise seemed unhappy. He was running amok in his enclosure with his neck at full stretch. I haven’t enjoyed a day out as much for years.
Back at the car, still grasping the green plastic frog he’d chosen at the gift shop, Oscar was fast asleep in his car seat about ten seconds after being strapped in.
Comments