Making friends

When I woke up and heard rain streaming down outside, I made a quick online booking at the local soft play centre.  With Richard due to be in London all day, I wanted an extra option for Luca - something beyond hanging out in the house with me all day.
So he and I pitched up at 'Medieval Mayhem' shortly after its 9.30 a.m. opening. To start with, he was keen for me to explore the furthest, highest reaches of the indoor 'castle' with him. It's like a giant, padded climbing frame, with a few added obstacles built in - rollers to slither over, swinging doors to negotiate, slides etc.
But I'm much slower at all this than him, of course, and I began to wonder how long I'd be able to keep up :-)
Then we had a stroke of luck.  Luca has shiny, shoulder-length hair, and he's sometimes mistaken for a girl. He and the one other boy in the place with a similar hairstyle spotted each other; perhaps they sensed a kind of compatibility. Anyway, they spent the next two hours racing around together, with occasional pauses for a cold drink when they got too hot.
The other lad, I discovered, is called Rex; like me and Richard, his grandparents look after him every Monday. The grandparents and I got talking, comparing notes and sharing the job of checking that all was well with Rex and Luca. 
Sometimes I feel that my socialising 'muscles' are getting all out of condition: these days I rarely chat with strangers like this. It was a real pleasure. We ended up exchanging phone numbers; not directly as part of a plan to keep in touch, but more because Rex's grandparents had taken a couple of nice photos of the two lads and I asked if they'd mind sending them to me. They live right on the other side of Sheffield, so they probably won't be regular visitors to this particular centre.  Today they were just looking for a bit of variety for Rex.  But if they do decide to drop in another time, there could be room for meeting up again.
The main shows Luca and Rex enjoying a make-believe game; it didn't matter to them at all that the coin-operated car was out of order (good news for us adults though, these things are money-extraction tools).
The extras show Luca before Rex turned up, and then later at home with Ruth - when true exhaustion had set in.
Later I took Eben to his weekly drum lesson.  He's still hitting those drums and cymbals at maximum volume; thankfully Anthony (the tutor) is methodically encouraging him to tone it down a bit.
Later still, I was in bed by 9.30 p.m....