Come on in

There is a song that suddenly popped into my head this week, it had been something i played to my young children and time has made me realise that they are both older and neither remember it, and i was only able to half sing it.

Being a parent is full of things i didn't expect and one of them is listening to angry rap artists shouting at me, rather than things like this.


Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair where I sit:
There isn't any other stair quite like it.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top:
So this is the stair where I always stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up, and isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery, it isn't in the town:
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
"It isn't really anywhere! It's somewhere else instead!"

(A A Milne)

The link with today’s door is of course "where i sit". This is the view from my desk, well... if i turn my head sideways (east) and look down rather than up. The heart in the foreground is on the back of a small paper flag that Minnie made at nursery school to greet the arrival, on cycles, of students from other schools in the area that linked together to share resources and then visited on a cycle tour.

Cynically you might say that this is just juvenile indoctrination to ensure a future generation of enthusiastic roadside spectators for the Tour de France event, but as Krissie discovered a few years later when she joined them (the kids not the professionals) it is a beautiful moment of discovery and solidarity.