Well, summer came and went in the first ten days of June and that twisted fiend called fate decided that my sunny shangri-la would be the perfect slot to dump all my bad luck on me. In the one week that we might just be calling 'summer' this year, my almost brand new laptop decided to give a new meaning to the term spring-cleaning by crashing so spectacularly that only a reset to the factory image software would do. Yes, we have probably all seen that irritating BT ad where Kris Marshall reassuringly soothes his broody partner that he can restore all the family photos from the backup file. Woe! Woe and thrice woe! What happens, then, when the backup gets wiped too? Answer: I could cheerfully strangle Michael Dell, but I am reserving my energies for the more positive purpose of seeking an online backup facility!
It dawned on me in the lost property office of Brighton's magnificent bus company that most of my bad luck seems to appear, rather gremlin-like,when the children are with me. It doesn't help that Nassim (aged 6¾ and counting manically) seems to have beeen equipped from birth with those batteries that simply never run out, or that his able assistant Imran (aged 5 but swears that he is 6) has taken to using his big bro as a blueprint for behaviour, thereby paying me back for not creating him first! Pity me! If God created mankind in his own image was that as an adult or as a child, because surely it would explain an awful lot if God is actually a spoilt five year-old?
I digress. Saturday: Sunny day, I thought, let's get the boys out and wear them out. Nassim refused point-blank to leave unless I let him take his new sunglasses. Grudgingly I agreed, whilst warning him that he would likely lose them. Hah! That I should tempt fate so blithely! Nevertheless, suitably equiped with Factor 30 sunscreen and a backpack full of picnic I took them both to Rottingdean to go rock-pooling and of course the tide was in. Never mind, pebble skimming was certainly one option and Imran had brought his scooter, so maybe a walk thrown in for good measure would guarantee me a brace of knackered nippers and an early bed. What I had not foreseen was their trance-like attraction to the recently installed, massive rock breakwaters. "Thanks dad!" said Nassim. "For what?" said I, in one of my even-more-naive-than-usual moments. "For bringing us rock-climbing, that's what!" said he, vanishing into the rocky yonder. Imran gave me that you sucker look, which he now delivers with a finesse rarely found in one so young, before he too was doing his impression of a hyped-up mountain goat.
Five minutes, a pair of lost sunglasses, and a hairy moment on top of the rocks later and it was back to Papa Page's surreal circus with me as the lion and Nassim as the ringmaster. Roaring from the top of what seemed an awfully precarious rock, I ordered both of them back onto terra firma, well not-so-firma seeing as the place was virtually wall-to-wall pebbles. It was at this point that both of them decided that they would do their impression of the Sussex prairie dog, dropping down between the rocks, only to pop-up briefly like demented telescopes, peering and leering and popping back down again just as quickly. Enough, I thought to myself, and enough it was. Sorry, but had I not been blessed with a sense of decorum that eschewed vulgarity, the air would have have been bluer than the sky that sunny day at Rottingdean. Armed with the threat of an ice-cream blackout, I flushed my little prairie dogs from their rocky retreat and we set off in search of a couple of Twisters, before boarding the No. 12 bus, which is where Imran left his scooter, and before you ask, it wasn't at the lost property office!
