We are the proud keepers of two little boys: Wee1 who is 5 and Wee2 who is 3. They are as the proverbial chalk and cheese – but, as is nature’s cruel and evil way, equally demanding: just in very different ways. Wee1 wants to know why things are, Wee2 wants to get down dirty and find out how. Wee1 is slight and sensitive but remarkably independent and resourceful; Wee2 is squat and bold but terrified of trying anything new (and certainly without his Mummy) and lost without someone’s hand to hold.
Wee2 attends a local playgroup for 21/2 hours a day which is worth its weight in gold: the play leaders are kind and beautiful and patient and loving: just what every 3-year-old needs. Wee1 is in his first year at Primary School and is learning to read at exponential speed. He is being taught a seemingly purely Christian perspective: which is curious, as his pre-school was really switched on about the festivals of other faiths. I must ask his teacher about this: I could be wrong and have just bred a ready-made Born-Again! The problem is that we don’t really live in a particularly ethnically diverse area, so he isn’t meeting people from other cultures/religions. It is changing slowly, but what do I do – run up to the only black family in town and ask to be their friend: because they are black? To me that has the same sincerity as those ghastly girls who want to be best friends with (any) gay men purely to boost their own kudos.
Anyway – whatever he is taught gets discussed at home and an alternative (where appropriate) proffered. However he has none of it: when I mentioned Darwinism as an alternative to Creationism this morning he didn’t stop laughing until we got to school. His take on Easter was that Jesus died on the cross, then got put in a cave, then the cave was empty because he’d gone back to the cross, died on it again, got put in a cave again, went back to the cross…. and so on… He can be very astute, though. He picked up a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh that I recently bought, asked about the man on the cover, so I explained who he was. Then he asked how he died, so I told him. ‘Why?’ Well, I replied, I don’t know – so that’s why I bought the book, to find out. ‘Hmmmm’ he replied, flicking through all 600+ pages of the book, ‘that’s an awful lot of words to find out why someone had their head chopped off’.

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