The box that used to be a boat

It rained all afternoon on Sunday, the serious kind that settles in and cancels your plans for you, and I spent it at a low table with a four year old and a six year old and a box of things that were not toys but had been promoted to toys by general agreement. Here is what I noticed, roughly in the order I noticed it, because noticing is most of my job and Sundays like that are where the noticing is best.

A cardboard box is worth more than whatever came in it, and both children know this, and no grown up remembers learning it. The box was a boat, then a cave, then a shop, then, briefly and thrillingly, a hat.

The rules of a game invented on the spot are defended more fiercely than any rule in any published book. I broke one without knowing it existed and was corrected with the gravity of a referee. There had, apparently, always been a rule that the red counter could not go in the water. I apologised to the red counter.

A six year old narrates. Everything. Out loud. The whole inner life is on the outside at that age, a running commentary on a small plastic horse and its many feelings, and you realise this is precisely what the rest of us go on doing later, only silently, and that they have simply not yet learned to be embarrassed by it, and that the not being embarrassed is the better way round.

The four year old lost all interest in the game at the exact moment of winning it, because the winning was never the point, the playing was, and the game ended not with a victory but with a wander off toward a far more interesting curtain.

Snack negotiations are conducted with a skill that would embarrass most adults in a meeting. Terms were proposed. A single biscuit was reframed as two smaller biscuits, and this was accepted as a painful concession by a party who had in fact just gained a biscuit.

Nothing was tidied, and the afternoon was a complete success, and those two facts are related. A tidy afternoon with children is an afternoon where not much happened. The mess is the receipt.

And then, quite suddenly, both of them were tired in the way that arrives like a weather front, all at once, no warning, and the same box that had been a boat was just a box again, and the day was over, and it was not yet five o'clock.

I write books for this age, and people sometimes ask where the ideas come from, as though there were a special shelf somewhere. There is no shelf. There is a low table, a wet Sunday, a box that used to be a boat, and a pair of people doing the most serious work there is, which is playing, and generously letting a grown up sit close enough to watch.