#24 - The beautiful rocks

It’s always fun to put yourself in the mind of a child, if only to try to get a sense of how they see the world via their overly large eyes and rapidly expanding brain power. People often think of kids as essentially like them, but smaller, but once you’ve spent a good amount of time with children you realise that nothing could be further from reality. Kids exist in their own worlds, both in terms of what they think about it and how they see themselves in it. It’s almost impossible to think like them.

Going on holiday with a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old, while also trying to do things that aren’t entirely child-focused is rather tricky. We’ve just done that, having spent a week in the lovely city of Bath. It would have been four nights, but we got an extra day added on after a leaky roof resulted in my 70-year-old mother getting a rather cold night-time shower. Sorry about that Mum, but your suffering was worth it, and I slept through the whole thing. On the extra day I bought a crispy pistachio brownie big enough to block a toilet! Winning overall.

But back to the kids. Near the end of the holiday my daughter was asking something about buses, I think because she’d been walking for 5 minutes and decided that was enough, and to try and explain it better she said: “Like when we saw the beautiful rocks.” On our first day away we stopped off at Stonehenge and got one of the shuttle buses from the visitor centre to the location of the stones. She hadn’t really said much about that day at all, but it became clear that she remembered them as “the beautiful rocks.”

That might sound like a whole lot of nothing to you, but it gave me a small insight into her world. One mostly dominated by adults and a considerably older brother, so much that we often wonder if she’s getting any enjoyment as we attempt to please everyone. Thankfully she is. She thought Stonehenge was beautiful.

Another cool thing about little kids is that you can say almost anything in a serious voice and they’ll believe it. I told my daughter that one of the reconstructed Neolithic houses (I had to Google that, such is the dire state of my sieve-like mind) at the Stonehenge visitor centre was where we were staying. She seemed OK with it, but on entering noticed something was up.

“There’s no TV,” she said. “You’ll just have to give me the iPad.”

Fair enough.

On the way back to our holiday home on our final day, having had a bonus day to walk around the lovely sights of Bath and take in a magnificent free art display (did my kids enjoy this? I don’t know, I may never know, but they didn’t cause any fuss while there, and there was this fleshy ball thing that looked like the homogenised blob from the video game, Inside), my daughter turned to my wife and said: “Mummy, do you remember that cute dog? It was the cutest little dog I’ve ever seen. Sooo cute.”

Bath was full of cute dogs. There were so many it wouldn't surprise me to learn that locals are required to own at least one small enough to be carried or pushed around in a buggy - only counting towards residency if onlookers turn to who they’re with to say, “Have you seen the size of that tiny dog?”. Bizarre that my daughter would home in on this moment, the dog witnessed at the counter in Bath’s FatFace, given she mostly doesn’t like dogs to the extent that she’ll turn away from one as it passes her or demand to be picked up. Anyway, the highlight of that day in her mind was this cute dog.

On our drive home we stopped off in Salisbury. Fans of Low Poly Mess will remember this as the location of the coffee shop in which I managed to finally have a wee after enduring a perilous two-hour drive while close to bursting - but that wasn’t our main reason for visiting this time. We looked around the Cathedral last time we were there, so this time we visited the museum. I’m not massively cultured, as I think is obvious if you read this, but my wife and son love history, and this museum is brilliant - even to my ignorant eyes.

Great efforts have been made to appeal to children of all ages here, which was wonderful, and one volunteer in particular went above and beyond to engage with us, even getting my daughter to come out of her shell a little to do some archaeology. If you read this, Nigel, you are a real asset to the museum!

But I digress. What I’m building towards is what my daughter said on the way to the toilet (there’s one in the on-site cafe, if you ever need that information).

“Is that old man one of your friends, Daddy?” she asked, speaking about Nigel.

“No,” I said. “He’s just a very friendly, kind man who volunteers here to tell people about things in the museum.”

“Oh,” she said. “I think you need more friends. Your only friend is Jim. Plus I am your friend. And <insert son’s name here> and Mummy.”

I think my wife might want to move to Salisbury so she can work with Nigel, such is her admiration of him, but I don’t think I impressed him much with my nursery-school-level CSI of a skeleton found in the ditch around Stonehenge. If Nigel quizzes you while you are visiting, the now skeletal man supposedly died from arrows in his back, as evidenced by the broken part of an arrowhead in the underside of a rib. My rather simplistic answer of “blood loss” wasn’t cutting it.

On our way back to the car park (which, to give Salisbury its dues, is huge - good job!) another memory from earlier that day popped into my daughter’s brain.

“The dog outside the toilet was soooo cute, Mummy. It only had one eye. It was soooo cute.”

I won’t go into the ins and outs of taking a small child into a public toilet, but it’s usually unpleasant thanks to the inhumane toileting behaviours of fully grown adults unable to piss correctly or clean up after themselves. Thankfully my daughter only remembers the cute, one-eyed dogs and the beautiful rocks.

It’s me that remembers the large bloke saying “sorry” as he left the toilet, offering a warning of what I was about to step into.

Sometimes I wish I was a kid.

I’ve been away all week, but we did manage to get in some Mario Kart World while on holiday. The more I play it, the more I rate it. I always felt its biggest issue was competing with the living memory of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but now that is fading as World starts to take over. We also played a lot of quizzes on YouTube, mostly about songs or characters featured in Disney and family films. I’m pretty good with naming the characters and films songs are from, but it turns out that I am beyond useless at song lyrics.

Let’s not pretend this newsletter is about video games - in fact, this one was a heart-warming tale of what my daughter enjoyed about our holiday. I’ll have a think about some other bits and pieces and round them up in the quick reviews below. I’m a critic, too, you see.

Things I can review:

• Iced Chocolate and Pistachio Luxury Frappe (Nero): I’m drawn to pistachio food at the moment, so I felt I had to try this when we stopped for a holiday break in Nero. The website bills this as “blended chocolate Frappe with flavours of salted caramel & pistachio, topped with dairy cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce.” I did opt for no cream in an attempt to avoid a health disaster, but I don’t think that was the reason this just tasted like blended sweetness. 1 Lidl Pistachio Spread out of 5 M&S Pistachio Crème
• Orange, white chocolate and chai bun (The Cornish Bakery): This bakery is the one I relieved myself in while in Salisbury all those months ago, but we also found ourselves in one in Bath for a snack before going into the Roman Baths. Everything here is wonderful, but a special shoutout to this incredible bun that’s sweet and citrusy - albeit hard to eat if you have facial hair. 5 wet wipes needed for all 5 mouthfuls.
• Trolleys at Sainsbury’s (Bath): Maybe I live in a more civilised part of the country, but I’m used to trolleys at Sainsbury’s not needing a pound coin inserted into them in order to use one. Not so in Bath! In the Bath Sainsbury’s we used, I almost had to carry my own weight in a basket, thankfully avoided by a desperate scrounge for a coin that came to fruition. Maybe it’s because it’s a student town, and we all know that students love to ride in supermarket trolleys! 1 heavy basket out of 5 smooth gliding trolleys.