My brother, sister-in-law and niece and nephew travel across from West London today to spend the day with Nana, Grandad and Aunty L1z.
Over lunch I tell Ruth and Jamie about how Grandad and I can do magic and make objects fall through the ceiling from upstairs onto the dining room table. They obediently stare intently at the ceiling to see if they can see anything come through. Despite their intense concentration they manages to miss them however and time after time various hazelnuts, almonds and brazil nuts magically appear on the table.
Jamie at three accepts all this but at the grand age of five (and a half), Ruth is way too smart for this and after being initially impressed, the suspicions quickly start to form in her mind and I’m dragged upstairs to investigate the source of the nuts. Fortunately we’re one step ahead and with a bit of co-operation nuts really do proceed to disappear from upstairs only to reappear downstairs.
I give it a year before she twigs that there are two of us magicians, whilst she can only be in one place at a time. Simple misdirection works fine for now however and a new generation of Chapmans believing in the ceiling trick is born.
Five years old is too young to stop believing in the wonder of things. I’m glad we’ve postponed her loss of innocence in this area a little longer. After all her first tooth is about to fall out, so now would be no time to stop believing in the tooth fairy ;-)
Back in the world where innocence has long since departed, I receive a call from a neighbour, Peter:
“L1z, just ringing to tell you that a stolen car has been dumped in your garden.”
“Oh…right…how do you know it’s stolen?”
“What other than the fact it’s dumped in your garden? Well the driver was about 12 years old”
“Ahhhh!”
“I’ll call the police and keep an eye out to make sure the scallies don’t come back and torch it.”
