Across the pond

Time: Saturday 3.15 PM. Scene: The path alongside the Parliament Hill Fields running track on Hampstead Heath. Characters: The men and children of the extended Jones family. (Granny and Mummy are having an after lunch rest.). Grandad is pushing Dulcie, just turned two, on her brand new tricycle. She has not yet got the knack of pedalling. But she can steer OK. I am well pleased.

Suddenly there is an exultant yell. Little Joe, all of four, zooms past on his sturdy blue mini-bike, father Lee running yards behind. He turns around and rides back. This time he pauses. ‘Grandad, I am riding without the stabilisers.’ Then, off he goes again. Riding up and down. The smile on his face getting broader and broader.

I am again well pleased. We now have another man in the family. I remember the day it happened to me. No stabilisers then. But I had learnt to ride with my father running behind holding the saddle until he judged I was ready to go it alone. I still get something of the same exultation when I zoom around London on my Yamaha scooter.

Time: Saturday 6.45. The kitchen in my house. Joe jumps up and says he wants to go home. Now. The conversation stops. But since it is more or less the right time for calling an end to this family get together minutes later we are all in the street loading up the car.

Joe, meanwhile, has ridden up to the top of the street. He comes zooming back downhill, speed increasing the further he goes. He steers around Granny’s clutching hands. Ignores her reasoning words. Up and down he goes while Dulcie is being strapped into the car seat. Now, it really is time to go. His father cries, ‘Joseph, come back here.’ Nevertheless it is another two turns before he is plucked from his bike and strapped into his car seat.

Leaving Grandad with words and images flooding his mind. Jeremy Clarkson pumping up the national adrenalin in prime television time. Omnipotent fantasies. William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. Repeated newspaper stories of teenage motor cyclists and car drivers bringing death and appalling injuries to themselves, their passengers and other users of the public highway.

Colin Bickley, the best diver in my class at school. I can still remember his lean brown body poised on the top board, then sweeping down in the perfect dive that produced only a ripple in the water. (Contrast: my own frequent belly flops.) I can still remember reading the story in the Wolverhampton Express & Star, when I learnt that he had killed himself, aged 17, by taking one dive too high.

The Greeks had a word for it. Icarus. But it also infects the female of the species. Flash forward to another superb high diver, the daughter of old friends of ours. Aged about 30 she hit the bottom of the pool and is now confined to a wheel chair.

I am thinking too much. Outside it is another very warm autumnal day. The Observer is lying unread on the doormat, the main headline screaming, ‘£3.68 trillion. The price of failing to act on climate change.’

I must do something before I am totally over-whelmed by all these negative thoughts. Oh, well. Just time to take the Yamaha for a spin in the country before lunch.