Tuesday 10th November

With your own children, you see them every day, you barely notice the changes.  A wriggling gurning blob whose chief function appears to be changing milk into shit is, before you notice, smiling and crawling around and then trying to and eventually succeeding in walking and talking.  But with your grandchildren, who you see too rarely and maybe only every couple of months or so, the changes are more noticeable.  What was once a to-be-admired and cooed at little thing suddenly has a character, a personality of their own.  And the terrible two’s are eventually succeeded by the all-knowing four-year-olds, and before you have time to draw breath they are starting school.  Those first five years are amazing by any measure.  And you will never get them back again.  Now they are out in the world, and making friends and contradicting Mummy and Daddy with ‘Teacher says’ and demanding their own i-pads and mobile phones.

All too soon the slower developing years of five to ten are gone too, and no longer young children and not quite teenagers they mooch around as if they are really adults belying their children’s bodies.  The teenage years are full of change too.  The uncertainties of thirteen are gradually replaced by the know-it-all of seventeen.  And by eighteen they are our equals, knowing and considering us old-fashioned with boyfriends and girlfriends they are at first moodily embarrassed about, and then again before you have time to appreciate the changes they are off to University or have moved to a different City or country even.

And then, lonely grandparents are waiting to be made to feel even older as great grandchildren start to emerge and the whole cycle repeats itself.  The pattern of life carries on, a ribbon of life that slips its code from one generation to another.  And all the while you are trying to make sense of it all too, and hoping these young ones will have an easier time of it than we maybe did, will not make quite the same mistakes we did, and will maybe have more time for their own children and grandchildren than we seem to have had for ours.