Down the Garden Path

It’s got hot.  Very hot.  So hot that the internal combustion engine that keeps me warm in the coldest temperatures in winter is currently squinting at the thermometer and relishing the fact that it has finally found some serious competition.  It has bought itself some training shoes and recruited a personal trainer and is really getting into shape, I think it’s building itself up for the heating Olympics.  This will likely sound familiar to many of you who also feeling the heat a bit, but I say it to try to explain why I am currently struggling to put one word after another in a way that is anything other than arrant gibberish (it may also go someway to explaining why I find the word arrant quite so bewitching.  It clearly means nothing at all, but has the potential to go with pretty much everything to brighten things up, much like salad cream really.

“Such an arrant picture”

“Arrant blogging, good sir”

“Andy played that shot most arrantly”

“Isn’t this heat arrant?”

“He’s really showing off his arrantness (arrantitude?) today”

And we could go arrantly on, but it’s probably best not to.)  Bet you’d forgotten that was in brackets hadn’t you?  How arrant.

Playing with words is all very well, but it isn’t really getting us any closer to a funny anecdote about my ineptitude as a father, which is, I presume, why you’ve all come, so let me offer you this.

Picture the scene.  Need me to flesh it out a bit more?  OK.

Dramatis Personae:

Me

N

B

Actually, two of those people are not true.  You see yesterday I was out at work and my wife had a conference to go to which meant that we had to turn to grandparental help for the day.  Nana and grandpa (they realised with N it would probably require a tandem effort, that’s the wisdom of the ages right there) duly turned up early on Monday so we could go and we left them.

The silence from them all day was deafening, neither B nor I heard a peep.  I chose to make the assumption that that meant everything was going fine.  No news, good news right?  Well, almost.  It seems N had rather taken advantage of the supply teachers to lead them on a bit of a goose chase.  You see we have a park which is not that far from where we live, but it is a reasonable walk.  You wouldn’t undertake it without some preparation, like crampons for the tricky climb at the end, (which is probably only a Category 4, but we’re not all Chris Froome are we?), or at least some concept of exactly where you were going.  Except nana and grandpa didn’t know this, so off they went, with N claiming every few steps that they were almost there.

They weren’t.  At least not for a while.  Eventually, after a route march led by my incorrigible (not quite arrant but almost) daughter the park was arrived at and a lot of fun was had by all, but mostly the daughter who was the only one with energy left I’m led to believe.

So thanks mum and dad, we’re sorry about the blisters on your feet and hope that you haven’t been put off for life.  

And after all that, I still never got around to giving you a witty anecdote about my own incompetence.  Well how completely errant.  Must be the heat.