I go and help my 5-year-old son with his storywriting at school a couple of mornings a week which means sitting in on mat time. I'm not sure who learns the most here. Be helpful, share and try your hardest. And put the lids on the felt pens.
On this particular day, one child was having an attack of the dwindles and the others all tried to pat and comfort him. Forget trekking to Machu Picchu, there is actually nothing more magnificent in the world than seeing small kids being kind to each other.
One of the most moving things I have read recently was an anecdote in Roald Dahl's autobiography where he talked about getting a sadistic caning at his brutal boarding school, punished for something he didn't do. When he was writing it, aged in his 80s, Dahl said he remembered how afterwards, when he could barely walk and was clutching his poor buttocks, all the children gathered around to console him, with caring sympathy.
One small boy, not even a particular friend, was so enraged at the injustice of it all that he declared he was going to sit down and write to his father who was someone high-powered in Westminster and make him put things right. The boy did write to his dad, but nothing ever happened and the horror continued. However, Dahl said he would think of it for the rest of his life and it made him feel better about human nature.
After school I was reading the paper in a glow of beneficence about human nature and stumbled over the item in the Sideswipe column about Omaha people wanting to band together to get a homeless man kicked out of their upmarket suburb. Maybe that's why I posted piously on Facebook "Did anyone think to ask why the guy was living rough? Or were they just worried he was using their fancy outdoor showers. Also: 'heavily tattooed' as shorthand for 'bad sort'? Aren't most hipsters in Ponsonby?" It is dangerous to bask in self-righteousness. (How fate lurks to sock you with the stuffed eel skin, as P.G. Wodehouse would say.)
