December 30th

Context is everything. A couple of weeks ago the eight year old was messing about on the roof of my car. I was standing right there, overseeing every move. He’s not doing any harm, he’s not liable to break anything or injure himself; he’s just hanging out on the roof of the car. Yet the overriding compulsion is not to leave him at it; something about a kid on the roof of a car does not fit and the impulse is to move to correct it, to make him come down. The situation is perfectly reasonable and controlled, yet it does not appear that way when you are parked outside the school waiting to pick up the older kids. If we were on holiday parked at a beach it would look more rational and normal, it would acquire an appropriate level of frivolity from its setting. The child wearing only a swimming shorts would take it to another level of whimsy, would reinforce its harmlessness. What’s harmless at a beach is anarchy outside a school.