Three generations

Starting at 5.45am with the piping alarm call, "Granma! GRANMA!", the Boy Wonder and his maternal oldies had a busy and fun-filled morning: breakfast, car ride with singing, Stratford playground, feeding of swans and geese on the Avon (no ducks being available, presumably for family reasons), drinks and cookies in Carluccio's (where two of the waiters remembered B, and came over to shake his hand), return car ride with more singing, lunch, packing, then back into the car for the return journey to Wales. By this point I might well have been in danger of falling asleep, but that B had devised a game in which he repeatedly kicked the back of my seat, I responded by pretending to be angry and turning round to shake my finger at him sternly, and he dissolved into howls of delighted laughter. Every time this palled slightly he'd take a break from it and sing some more songs - or sometimes a jigsaw of bits of several different songs, which managed to be both excruciating and funny.

By the time we met L in the car park at Tredegar House, all of the Shire crew were in high spirits, and in the café we regaled her with stories of the fun we'd had. After that, because the Boy was still pretty hyper, we took him into the gardens to run off some of his energy, and then when it was time for us to go our separate ways, R and L asked B if he wanted to be swung to the car. They might have thought twice of this if they'd known how much he was going to enjoy it, and had calculated the distance they had to cover.

"One, two three.... WHEEEE!" they said on every lift.

"More!" said the Boy, each time his feet touched the ground. "More wheeee!"

R doesn't usually go in for the kind of historical perspective he sees as my speciality ("You live through time," he said to me once, many years ago, "and I live in it."), but today he suddenly went all misty-eyed at the realisation that he and the daughter he used to swing around when she was a tiny child were now swinging her own small boy. Said small boy, of course, lives completely in time: having been swung to L's car and strapped in for the remainder of his journey home, he waved a breezy hand at R and me, said "Bye!", and set to work on a packet of snacks. When I leaned into the car, said how much I'd enjoyed his visit, and asked for a goodbye embrace, I received a cursory air kiss and a dismissive flick of the wrist that plainly meant go away now - so we did.