The weatherman had breezily predicted a fine, warm, spring day — and it was. We were on the road early, my grandson sitting beside me on his booster seat, keenly searching the unfolding scenery with his pellucid blue eyes for notable things to report. At three and a half years old his speech and understanding have taken a Great Leap Forward. His days of vacuous innocence are behind him. He has become garrulous and vivacious and imbued with a fervent desire for knowledge and experience. And what better thing could there be to satisfy that desire than to spend a day with his grandfather at the Devon County Show.
His life to date has been limited and parochial. It was safe to say that this would be a day of firsts. It was his first time on a motorway, for one thing. Also his first time stuck in traffic on a motorway. He enjoyed it. There was so much to see: a police helicopter circling beneath a half moon, a crow gallantly mobbing what it thought was an enormous hawk, but was in fact a tethered, hawk-shaped kite. And that was just the sky. The traffic was comprised of some incredibly exciting items: a gleaming steel milk tanker, open-topped sports cars with amiable drivers who waved back, 1,000 cc motorbikes weaving mazily between the lines, hefty juggernauts powered by glamorous tractor units tricked out with chrome. And for several minutes we were stationary beside a car parked on the hard shoulder in which the lady driver sat weeping. She was staring unseeingly out of the window, tears pearling down her cheeks. If she’d wound down her window we could have reached out and dabbed them with a tissue. There was so much to see.
Finally we parked with a thousand other cars in a field of long grass.
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