school,’ he says, setting off at a sprint that I know he’ll find unsustainable after about a hundred metres.
I think about Polly doing her essay. Where has all the information gone that I retained during that intensive period from school to university, I wonder? Is it lost for ever? For sure the decline began in the childbearing years, when whole new areas of specialist interest opened up. Pushchairs, for example. A few years ago, I could have written a long essay on pushchairs. Securing our first took longer than buying a car. It required more viewings than buying our house.
I remember a conversation in my office with a couple of male colleagues who were having babies at the same time as I was pregnant with Sam. Fed up with weekends spent in baby shops, baffled and befuddled by the sheer variety of pushchairs, we sat down together in a meeting room with various catalogues, hoping that between us we had collated and analysed enough information to come to some conclusions. But after half an hour, we were still involved in hefty debate over issues such as weight, forward-folding designs versus collapsibleoptions, sporty or rural. The statistical analysis required was beyond us.
Then, when Sam was born, medical expertise became the new priority. It became crucial to know exactly how to use a glass to distinguish between viral and meningococcal rashes; it was useful to know that digital thermometers gave readouts that were always slightly too high; and it was humbling to discover that the anti-inflammatory powers of Savoy cabbages and frozen peas made them much more than vegetables. Now the specialist subjects have widened further. Schools top the list. The depth of knowledge required to dominate that particular area is worthy of a PhD.
I look up and see Tom running towards me, waving his arms.
‘It’s not there,’ he shouts.
‘God, it must have been stolen again,’ I say. At least this time I know that I haven’t lost the spare key.
‘Are you sure that you left it at school? I’m going to go inside and ask Sam if he remembers,’ he says, immediately taking charge of the situation and running towards the house again. Within minutes he is running out again. There is something comical about all his rushing around, as though he is living life in fastforward, while I meander along on play and rewind, and I start to giggle.
‘I don’t know why you find this funny, we’re three-quarters of an hour behind schedule,’ he shouts, this time in anger, because his face is so close to mine that there is no reason to raise his voice. ‘Sam says that you left it outside Starbucks.’ But the angrier he gets, the more I giggle.
‘It’s strange because as I was running back I saw a blue Peugeot on the corner of that street but of course I didn’trealise you had parked it somewhere completely different.’
So we set off running together. Past the same trees and houses that I walk by every day on my way to school, waving to the nice man with the black Labrador walking in the opposite direction, noting that one of the street lamps is broken, past the new Tesco Metro, hurdling the legs of the homeless man who always sits outside. Although our pace is evenly matched and we run in time – and to the people we pass on the pavement, there must be a satisfying physical symmetry in our movements – we could not really be further apart. We do however find the car.
‘Lucky this happened tonight and not on a school morning,’ I say.
‘It’s nothing to do with luck, Lucy, and everything to do with poor planning,’ says Tom.
I would like to continue the conversation we were having earlier, but I know that all my energies must now be invested in lifting the mood that has settled over the evening.
Tom drives silently, gripping the steering wheel in quiet fury, silence being the greatest punishment of them all. I am grateful that there is no moon tonight. I am grateful that we are going on ill-lit back roads through the
I think about Polly doing her essay. Where has all the information gone that I retained during that intensive period from school to university, I wonder? Is it lost for ever? For sure the decline began in the childbearing years, when whole new areas of specialist interest opened up. Pushchairs, for example. A few years ago, I could have written a long essay on pushchairs. Securing our first took longer than buying a car. It required more viewings than buying our house.
I remember a conversation in my office with a couple of male colleagues who were having babies at the same time as I was pregnant with Sam. Fed up with weekends spent in baby shops, baffled and befuddled by the sheer variety of pushchairs, we sat down together in a meeting room with various catalogues, hoping that between us we had collated and analysed enough information to come to some conclusions. But after half an hour, we were still involved in hefty debate over issues such as weight, forward-folding designs versus collapsibleoptions, sporty or rural. The statistical analysis required was beyond us.
Then, when Sam was born, medical expertise became the new priority. It became crucial to know exactly how to use a glass to distinguish between viral and meningococcal rashes; it was useful to know that digital thermometers gave readouts that were always slightly too high; and it was humbling to discover that the anti-inflammatory powers of Savoy cabbages and frozen peas made them much more than vegetables. Now the specialist subjects have widened further. Schools top the list. The depth of knowledge required to dominate that particular area is worthy of a PhD.
I look up and see Tom running towards me, waving his arms.
‘It’s not there,’ he shouts.
‘God, it must have been stolen again,’ I say. At least this time I know that I haven’t lost the spare key.
‘Are you sure that you left it at school? I’m going to go inside and ask Sam if he remembers,’ he says, immediately taking charge of the situation and running towards the house again. Within minutes he is running out again. There is something comical about all his rushing around, as though he is living life in fastforward, while I meander along on play and rewind, and I start to giggle.
‘I don’t know why you find this funny, we’re three-quarters of an hour behind schedule,’ he shouts, this time in anger, because his face is so close to mine that there is no reason to raise his voice. ‘Sam says that you left it outside Starbucks.’ But the angrier he gets, the more I giggle.
‘It’s strange because as I was running back I saw a blue Peugeot on the corner of that street but of course I didn’trealise you had parked it somewhere completely different.’
So we set off running together. Past the same trees and houses that I walk by every day on my way to school, waving to the nice man with the black Labrador walking in the opposite direction, noting that one of the street lamps is broken, past the new Tesco Metro, hurdling the legs of the homeless man who always sits outside. Although our pace is evenly matched and we run in time – and to the people we pass on the pavement, there must be a satisfying physical symmetry in our movements – we could not really be further apart. We do however find the car.
‘Lucky this happened tonight and not on a school morning,’ I say.
‘It’s nothing to do with luck, Lucy, and everything to do with poor planning,’ says Tom.
I would like to continue the conversation we were having earlier, but I know that all my energies must now be invested in lifting the mood that has settled over the evening.
Tom drives silently, gripping the steering wheel in quiet fury, silence being the greatest punishment of them all. I am grateful that there is no moon tonight. I am grateful that we are going on ill-lit back roads through the
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