My youngest daughter is dressed and ready for school but is already in her own world. It’s this morning, around 7.00am. The air in the house is thankfully cool and vibrant once again after the humid torpor of the past few days that rendered us all mute and distracted from the normal family sensibilities. She stands in her bedroom lost in thought and looks out of her window to the back garden below and the fields and woods beyond. The sun is streaming through and bathes her in its muted warmth. She lifts the recorder to her lips and practises the piece she’ll soon be performing at the summer fair. I’ve been away on business for what seems like a lifetime and it’s my first opportunity to hear her play this particular melody. She doesn’t see me hovering at her door. As she plays her head bobs slowly and assuredly and I look at the shadow cast on the wall behind her. It is festooned with prints and postcards she has collected of Albert Irvin’s child-like abstracts and Gary Hume’s minimalist birds of bright colours, mingled with her own rainbow artwork of puffins, pufflings and assorted panoramas. With her red and white checked dress, yellow headband, bright orange slippers and olive tanned skin she looks as if she’s stepped out of the riotous collage itself, her shadow on the bedroom’s gallery wall the imprint she’s left in her wake.
I close my eyes and as I listen to her I’m reminded of an old song by Alan Hull I’ve not listened to for many years.
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Lovely little snapshot.
However. I have had years of herding under 10s in the morning, and I refuse to believe that it is possible for them to be dressed and ready for school by 7:00am. Please tell me that your daughter is at secondary school.
She’s 7 and is normally awake between 6 and 6.30am regardless. She rarely gets ready so early but, on occasion, has these rare periods of being very self-sufficient and timely before leaving the house. I suspect today was one of those occasions because a) her older sister had the riot act read to her last night about leaving everything to the last minute and b) it’s school sports day and she was excited about the races she was due to compete in last night.