Slow Life | 21 February 2009

Child’s play

During the night or behind a cloud the sunshine had changed colour, and now as it shone all over me it launched cascades of contemplation, pleasant images flashing like fireworks as it smashed into my closed eyelids. Bang, bang, bang and involuntarily I was carried off, launched headlong down a fast-flowing river of rediscovered hopes. Whole new vistas came into view with those gold rays. Don’t even know what I’d been thinking about before, but with the warmth came a bigger picture, new horizons, thoughts of escape.

We’ll do a week in Bournemouth. We’ll go to Scotland, Japan maybe, the whole world: all this unfolding quicker than a dream in a sleeping corner of my mind waking with that first kiss of 2009 vintage sunshine. What a wonderful thing a fair day in February is, the most perfect kind of perfect day.

I should say that I happened to be dressed as Darth Vader as I felt that first glow of spring — voice changer, lightsaber, the works. On the other side of the room on the far shore of a boiling sea of small children my wife was a full guns-blazing Princess Leia. There was something inadvertently faintly porno about the costume she had ordered: white nylon split up to the thigh. Looked good.

The house was full to bursting with five-year-olds dressed mainly as tooled-up Jedi knights and, being in the guise of their enemy, I was the obvious target for their weapons. Wearing a sign saying ‘whack me’ wouldn’t have done the job quite as well in fact, as most of them can only just about read their names, but they all know Darth Vader is the bad guy. I felt that spring sunshine on my face when I removed my mask to have firm words with one particularly determined Power Ranger who kept poking me on the nose as hard as he could with his plastic basher.