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.
It was a Star Wars party, but there were one or two Spidermen and quite a lot of fairies and overall they were an astonishingly well-behaved crowd. Perhaps when Darth Vader speaks they cannot help but obey. ‘Sit down in a nice big circle,’ I said from time to time, and they all did, every single time. It was unexpectedly, incredibly satisfying effortlessly to summon order from so much chaos. The authority of Vader even seemed to be having a certain effect on my wife. It was all going very well. It was a good party. In fact, I think it was the best party I’ve been to for ages, the best fun. Just acting stoopid and dancing to the theme music from Dr Who. I used to love going to parties but since I got married, well, I’d much rather sit by the fire. Kids parties are different, though. They suddenly seem fascinating. There are games and all kinds of things happening.
A couple of weekends ago I dropped the boys off at a birthday do at the village hall and ended up staying to watch the magician, who was so brilliant and good-looking he should have been on television. It was at that party I got the low-down on lightsabers from the other dads. It’s hard to know where to go for that kind of thing now Woolworth’s has gone. For children the end of Woolworth’s is like the collapse of the Bank of England would be for adults — it’s where all their treasures were stored.
Most of the parents hire out the village hall and some kind of entertainment or inflatable bouncy device so as to spare the furniture and ensure that they’re not the ones getting whacked on the nose. But we thought we’d go for the old-fashioned kind of knees-up at home. It was nice remembering all those classic games, musical statues, blind Vader’s buff, pin the lightsaber on Yoda. They’ve all evolved a little bit since I last played them. Pass-the-parcel has two parcels nowadays, going in opposite directions and there are small presents inside each layer. It is important that every child gets to unwrap a layer, but towards the end it’s hard to keep an eye on what both parcels are doing and stop the music at the point where the children who haven’t had anything yet are holding the parcels at the same time. I gave up trying in the end.
When they all shoved off exhausted and happy with their little goody bags it seemed to have been going on for a lot longer than two hours. It was winter when we started, and now I’m sure it is spring.
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