Alley

Wean wasn't well last night but made it to school. Then I got a call from my wife to pick him up early as he was feeling unwell again. On the way home in the car he told me that part of what made him unwell was a video they had shown in class, about world religions, which mentioned the second coming. He has developed a fear about certain subjects, such as god and various cosmic phenomena (the Big Bang, etc.). Obviously, the best way to deal with such fears is to confront them, so, although he'll recite his mantra, 'I don't want to talk about it', I usually get him to talk, if only a little bit, about what scares him, and emphasise that these things are only ideas, stories or things that are either too distant or too small to do him any harm.

He declared that he wanted to go for a walk, and eventually, after I'd done some class work, we took Lola into the park. It was sunny and not too cold, and we threw balls for her until he went into the playground for awhile. I told him I'd buy him some crisps on the way home (not something I often do but he hadn't eaten much) and before going to the corner shop, I took him down a little back road behind the houses on Carysfort Avenue, where I had a feeling there might be something to photograph. On the street where, a few years ago, a friendly woman had invited us into her house and given him a chocolate orange, we found a little alley I'd never noticed before. He wanted to run down it, so I told him to go ahead and shot a few frames, including this one.

This, then, is what a good day (a happy day) amounts to: an officially sanctioned bunking of school, a walk in the park, a run down an alley, the fears shrunk and put in their place, small as a silhouette you'd pass without a second glance.