Most of the time I feel a bit sad for living quite so close to where I grew up. Worthing holds no magic for me – true there is a memory on every street corner but actually because I’ve spent my whole life here the happy childhood snapshots types have been largely diluted by watching it change from quite a pleasant seaside resort with it’s own charm and feel to a subsidery of Brighton (which I think still has a lot of charm), rather a ‘chav’ town, none of the delights of a city and all the crapness. Having lived in South Manchester for a couple of years we experienced all the good sides of city living and the in my opinion / experience the massive difference between southerners and northerners too. Odd to feel more attached to somewhere I only lived for a couple of years but I love going back there far more than I used to look forward to visiting Worthing when we didn’t live here.
Anyway, where I was going with that was that today we went to a park where we occassionally went when I was a child. It’s across the road from my parents house – walkable in about five minutes and although I was not really a ‘park’ child as a kid and neither were my parents ones for taking us to them particularly I do have various memories of being there as a child. It’s a huge green with cricket and football pitches, trees all around the periphery, an enclosed playground area in the centre and right in the middle a biggish area of trees. When I was a child it used to be totally trees, really dense in the middle and we used to spend hours in there making camps and clambering about. In the late 80s they thinned it out in the centre to make a BMX track as was the craze back then. I distinctly recall going there with my Dad and his cousin who was visiting one January when we had a rare heavy snowfall and having a fantastic time in this massive space full of snow.
So this morning we all had to be dressed and breakfasted far earlier than usual to be at the GPs for 8.30am. I’ve had a small very itchy patch of skin on the back of one hand for weeks and weeks. It has cleared up and come back several times and last time I used a smear of my Mum’s steroid cream and it went overnight but it’s back and driving me mad so I went to the docs to get some steroid cream of my own. She reckons it’s ringworm though which reading the description online seems fairly likely so I’ve got antifungal cream instead. I’m blogging this mainly because there was a conversation with the children while in there which was interesting and needed the background to explain, not because I really wish to share the woes of my itchy fungal infection with the world! 😉 They were sitting on the floor playing with a basket of toys while I talked to the doc and we suddenly both became aware that they were trying to identify the species of an odd plastic toy with eight springy legs. Scarlett was saying ‘it can’t be a spider Davies, spiders don’t have antennae’ and Davies was saying ‘but it can’t be a crab because crabs have pinchers and this has got wheels’. They then realised we were watching / listening to them and Davies came over to find out more about what me and Doc were talking about. She was looking up something in her medical book so I explained to Davies about my itchy bit on my hand and he asked why I didn’t just put ‘itch cream’ on it (Euradex – used it on his recent rash) so I explained that it didn’t help and we talked a bit about itches and then about how if someone mentions something itching then you feel it on yourself too. I said that if you talk about itchy eyebrows then everyone suddenly starts scratching at theirs – and indeed me, both children and Doc did – so we’ve been doing that all day, trying to get each other to scratch somewhere 😀
We came home and I did a couple of loads of washing, made some cheese scones and chocolate chip cookies to take with us to the park while the children did drawing and watched Discovery Kids. I love DK, it’s really educational but put across in a really fun way – I think they have the balance just right.
Off to the park and we met up with Julie, Jack and Maisie and the older couple who HE their grandsons. Davies went off with the younger of the two boys who is 8 into the trees in the middle of the park. I nipped over to check on them and was assured by him that ‘aslong as Davies stays with me he will be under excellent supervision’ 🙂 He is HFA, very charming and excellent with Davies as he doesn’t really do playing but enjoys exploring and is very old head on young shoulders. They were off together for a good 20 minutes and Davies really seemed to enjoy being with an older boy for a while until they left and he went back to being the leader with Scarlett, Jack and Maisie again.
Julie and I stayed for another hour or so and let the children go out of sight and explore which is always nice to let them have the freedom to do, while we chatted. Then we went into the playground bit for a final go on the swings and slides before being beaten by the wind and ever changing weather and going home.
Back home the children did some dot to dot and colouring in of sheets with letters on from the scrapstore, whilst watching more Discovery Kids and then having their tea.
I really must do the exercise a couple of others have about jotting down the conversations we have during a day as we cover such diverse subjects and they come out with such interesting questions and observations that I’m forever thinking ‘oh I must blog that’ and forgetting.