The child has apparently started to question his role in the universe, why he is here – specifically why he lives in this house, with this family.

Alan Watts talks about cultural differences between the East and the West and looks at the role of God and society in shaping the way you see the world and your place in it.

He says of the West that there is the image of God as creator and so we see the world as matter that we shape and put our mark on. So it follows that a child would ask ‘how was I made?’

In the East however, a child is more likely to ask ‘how did I grow?’

Despite our best efforts to have him involved in growing tomatoes, in looking after a chicken and fetching it’s eggs of a morning, the way our son phrased his existential quandary: ‘Where did you buy me?’

Oh dear.

I am barely awake before thrust into a world far stranger than the dreams that had proceeded. I sit with the boy in his room and follow strict instruction. I must construct a dinosaur out of Duplo bricks. It must be tall and strong and yellow. Containing a door, slide and a gate apparently. Meanwhile he creates a robot of a less precise nature.

I do my best, managing to keep it symmetrical and give it some likeness: head, feet, tail made from the slide (not my first rodeo). He likes it. So much so that he immediately dismantles it, and uses its skeleton to form a zoo. How meta.

Just like the Marble Run tracks that I obsessively construct to turn into a race with an unknowable outcome, to teach him that winning and losing are both fun aspects of a game – he celebrates by immediately taking it apart, sometimes so carefully that I find it difficult to pinpoint the emotion I’m feeling.

It happens on such a regular basis that I have stopped insisting that we leave a fully constructed dinosaur on the bedside, or have a few races before packing away the circuit. I let it go. I move onto the next thing. And still I will put the same level of effort into it because what would be the point otherwise.

I’m being taught a lesson here – of the transient nature of creation, how something is never complete or perfect, it is just one in a series of things, a necessary intermediate between this and the next. There’s another dinosaur in here somewhere, or better yet a zoo that will house Batman along with the fish and polar bears, because after all he’s not merely a man.

A bit grandiose I realise but it makes sense to me the more I repeat it, and I’m getting pretty good with these bricks.

Colouring a picture of a fireman and noting that the act of saving a cat from a tree is ‘nice’, I ask the boy if he wants to be a fireman. ‘No I can’t, I don’t have a helmet.’ I tell him that this doesn’t matter and ask about when he’s older, if he’d want to be a fireman. He pauses his colouring to think about this. What do you want to be?

‘Charmeleon’

So more on the arson side of fire, but I admire him not aiming for Charizard – keeping his dreams realistic.

It was past midnight. I had just dropped a friend home after work when he had text me to say one of my tail lights was out. Another fault to add to the list. Bombing it home a white car comes up behind me, and after flying over a roundabout it keeps my speed so I assume it’s going to overtake and speed ahead. Thats when the blue silent disco starts in my rearview.

One officer checks the back, the other the front. He says he smells unburnt fuel and notices the engine light on. Apparently I have a headlight out, as well as a tail light. Aw I know that one! I pull out my phone with the perfect alibi providing text. He shines a torch on my face. Don’t I know you? Have I pulled you over before? No, never been pulled over before – I say, perhaps too proud of myself considering the situation. Was I going a bit fast? (I offer forward like a brazen fucking idiot. It must have looked like I was speeding away from a crash). My instinct was to speed up as you pulled up behind me. Yeah you shouldn’t do that.