Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron

I had assembled a rattle, a teddy, a pencil sharpener and a Duracell battery to flourish at a circle of three-year-olds in Sunday school. With these I hoped, by some divine miracle, to explain the mystery of the Trinity. Why, if things went well, I might even end up understanding it myself. As the introit hymn began, my optimism was fading. How do you teach the infinite and the unknowable? How, armed with my household plunder, do I foster faith in the unseen? I had underestimated the quiet certainty of children. Has anyone, I asked, seen God? The Duracell battery, concealed in a rummage bag, was waiting to show how one can believe without seeing.  But… "I have!" piped a three-year-old. "Where?" I asked, disconcerted. "In the jungle." "What did He look like?" "He had a long trunk". A pause. I held my props ready to enlighten the doubters. "Has anyone else seen God?" I asked. "I have!" replied a four-y...

'Bucker!' cursed my then two-year old when she got behind the wheel of her Little Tike car. 'Bucker, bucker, bucker!' I admonished her for swearing. 'I have to,' she said. 'I'm driving.' Now her language has become more decorous as she steers a Skoda across the roof of a car park and topples a bollard. And she keeps a cool that would elude me as she dodges an oncoming car and brakes just before the wall that separates us from a five-storey drop onto the Brent Cross retail park. Multi-storey car parks do not bring out the best in my character, but my 13-year-old shows signs of being superior in temperament and skill. Behind, her 11-year-old brother reverses tidily into a free parking space. Unlike me he collects no strangers' wing mirrors in the manoeuvre. I, meanwhile, am still recuperating from wrestling my own Skoda through the perils of the North Circular to get here. I had to get the Vicar to park it. The children are having their first...