Dichotomies Galore / Moments in Time

Yes I know, it sounds like a Greek Bond girl, but that wasn't what I meant. I couldn't decide on the half humourous "Bond Girl" pun title or to go with the slightly sentimental but also deep and meaningful title.

I chose both. It's my blog after all.

Yesterday I got involved in one of those fatherly incidents, one which I honestly thought I'll look back on in years to come with fondness and nostalgia. My girls are now ten and twelve, so they're growing fast. Their world consists of music, fashion and hormones. They're at that stage where parents are becoming a bit of a pain, handy for dropping them and picking them up from places, handy for money and material things but frankly not much good for anything else.

Although one of the big advantages of being in a band or two is that I'm in the "cool Dad" category. I can live with that, particularly as it will only last for a short while until I'm uncool for a load of other reasons too. But, these rather scary girls still have some of that sweet childishness in them, they're on the cusp and will still grab a parent's hand while walking along the road or do something affectionate without thinking.

So, there we were in the front room. The wife was prowling around the house somewhere and the girls and I were playing with Lego. This in itself was a bit sentimental, in a full circle sort of way, as the Lego that they have is mostly the old stuff that my brothers and I used to play with, it's even in the same attache case thing that it used to live in. I had been given the task of making a petrol station, quite an important task but one that they felt I was capable of too.

They were making things, I know not what, I was trying to find more of the two by two squares, an essential component for my petrol pumps, and all was jolly. At the start of our session we'd had a bit of disagreement about the background ambience and sounds. The twelve year old had wanted Spongebob Squarepants on TV but the ten year old and myself had wanted to listen to Muse on CD. We came to a decent compromise, not conventional but one that we could all live with; we played both at the same time. That was the first dichotomy, the contrast between the cartoon on TV, admittedly one that does have a large adult audience, and the rather "adult" music blasting out. We all enjoyed both.

Then, whilst building our Lego stuff, I found myself explaining to the two girls about the six or seven different types of intelligence. I went through each one and gave them examples of the kind of people who have high levels of each. (Java, Drac you may be shuddering at the thought, sorry about that). They were fascinated and uncharacteristically interested in my every word.

Then, I finished the lecture, they both said "Oh okay then" and we carried on with our Lego, with Muse blasting out from the speakers and Spongebob Squarepants living in his underwater world.

It really was a bucket load of dichotomies, it really was a moment in time.

Brief, because my next task was to build a furniture store.

And my level of spatial intelligence is rather low.