Typhoid Mary (Summer 2010)

I spent much of the other weekend in the garden with Lily, who is nearly 4, and growing up at a quite dizzying rate. Until recently she was easily entertained by being spun around in the chair in my study, or by being given a pad of post-it notes and red felt tip, or half a pint of lemonade and a slab of chocolate on the morning that her parents were due to arrive to pick her up, but now..

Now we take up our respective positions under an apple tree. Me in my big garden chair, her in one of the miniature pink ones, and as we cluster around the matching tiny pink table with its little parasol, she takes a sip from her Sponge-Bob cup and looks across at me coolly.
“So,” she begins, “remind me what we were talking about last night?”
The first time this happened I was genuinely thrown, it was if one of our resident ghosts, perhaps Cinderella Bawden herself, had taken possession of the poor child.
As an aside, I have to report that as I type the name Cinderella Bawden the hairs on my arms are standing to attention.

From, what were we talking about last night, we proceed into what counts for me at least as a philosophical discussion about all sorts of unexpected subjects, and then we run around for a bit and have an ice-pole from the freezer and I pretend to be a monster and then if someone falls over and scrapes her knees it’s invariably Sandra whose presence is called for and I become aware of my standing when things of true import are taking place.

I don’t know why it is that small children seem to have permanently runny noses, and as Lily marries that up with a nasty and perpetual cough, and either Sandra or I come down with something shortly after she’s come to stay, I’ve dubbed her Typhoid Mary.

During the weekend I often reassured her that none of the many bees about the garden would harm her. “If you leave them alone,” I said, “they’ll leave you alone.”
After Sunday lunch, everyone was in the kitchen when I dashed in from the garden and stuck my hand under the cold tap, then, in a fruitless attempt to get it off, sloshed olive oil over my ring finger which was already starting to swell and squeeze up and out at the sides of my wedding band. I have to report that, amid the rather diffident response, there was actually some mild hilarity, one wag observing, “Bees won’t hurt you then?”

And they won’t, unless you happen to be tidying away a little pink chair underneath which a fat, drunken, orange bumble bee was sleeping one off. His angry ginger genes aroused when I tickled him inadvertently, he responded in the only way he knew.

I’m glad, of course that it was me and not Lily who took the hit. It’s been a bit irritating for a week and now it’s the same colour as my balls were after the lump was removed. But I’m also pleased because, given the fact that she’s a walking Petri dish full of all sorts of viruses and malevolent bacteria, God knows what might have happened had bee venom been introduced to the mix. It would have made the millennium bug and bird flu look like a load of fuss about …um, nothing…...Ahhh...