I’m showing my youngest grandson a pot that I made when I was 14 years old, but the tiny boy doesn’t seem that impressed. He’s only nine months old, and I conclude he’s too busy with other tasks.
Over the coming months he’s facing his own kind of Everest. The expectation is that he’ll learn to walk, learn to speak English and learn to use a spoon – all in the next year or two. Given his quite peculiar parents, he may also be required to learn the banjo.
Imagine if all humans could achieve the progress of the typical baby.Credit: Getty Images
Do people give enough sympathy to the babies of the world and what they are meant to achieve in the first 20 months of existence? It’s a lot! I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you done in the past 20 months? Me? I’ve traded up to a new car, repainted the shed and started a failed crop of coriander. I also considered learning a language, before deciding I wasn’t sufficiently clever.
Meanwhile, the under-twos, under-threes and under-fours are hard at it. My middle grandson went from slippery-dip averse to slippery-dip king just the other day. Pip, the oldest one, instructs Nana when it comes to the names of birds. “That’s a plumed egret,” he observed the other day, which was news to........