Motherload

On the tube today, after a trip to the Geffrye Museum , which I'd really enjoyed, for its insights into the Middling Class parlour, and the (now-gone) role of the Lady of the House, I found seats for my daughter and her friend, and spied an empty fold-down seat next to them. Both the fold-downs were empty, actually. Across them was parked a Maclaren pram (without its occupant, I hasten to add). I picked my way through the carriage, and started to lower the seat, until I realised it was going to touch the strut of the pram. Not wanting to cause any damage, I moved the pram a few inches back, so that I could sit down. As the train set off, the pram tipped up, as they do when the handles are overladen. Instinctively I reached out to stop it, and looked up to find its owner had beaten me to it. "That was dumb!" I laughed, meaning nothing very much except a gesture of solidarity towards all the times this had happened to me. "Yes. It was," the woman hissed at me.

I was watching teenage boys the other day. Don't worry, I'm no cougar, although I was abstractly looking at their just-formed musculature, their flicky hair, their sulky pouts, and thinking how beautiful they were, these young animals, as they hopped and flew on their skateboards. Our seven-year-old boy was trying to keep up with them on his trick scooter — half their height, without the fuzzy facial hair on his upper lip, and with upper arm muscles that look like tiny chicken dippers. He tried to zoom up the board they had leant against a block in the skatepark, and didn't have the oomph to leap over its lip, so kept sliding back down, bringing the board with him. They stood in a row, a frieze of beautiful youth silhouetted against the setting Spring afternoon sun, calling to him not to bother, to stop trying. Boy picked up his scooter and carried it off the piste, through the grass to sit behind a nearby tree. I sauntered casually over, to find him moodily staring i