Wolf spotted in Marlay Park being chased by a three-year-old garda

MY son turned three on Monday. That evening, before bedtime, there was a cake and balloons. He blew out the candles on his cake and his big sister (who turns six in three weeks) helped him sing Happy Birthday.

And that was about it. I wanted to give him the best birthday ever and this, clearly, was not it. On the morning of his birthday I took him out to the park nearby. I’m sure going to the park on his birthday morning didn’t fill him with unconfined joy because it is part of our routine anyway.

I am not sure either of us particularly relish it, but our routine is what it is. Every weekday morning, come rain or shine, we go out to a nearby park for two-and-ahalf hours while his mother home-schools his sister.

When it rains, we sit in the car and play with toys. Sometimes, if it is raining when we are already in the park, we take shelter under a tree. We can’t go home when his sister is being educated because it ends up in chaos and nothing gets done. So we go out instead in the wind and the rain.

The gardaí know us at this stage. They have stopped asking me the purpose of my journey. They see my son in the back and they know we are not off to a rave in the midlands.

On Wednesday the guard appeared to have an amused look on his face when I rolled down the window at the checkpoint off the M50 near Sandyford and Bob Dylan was singing on the car CD: “Every step of the way we walk the line/Your days are numbered, so are mine.”

When we got to the playground in Cabinteely

Park my son went on the zip line and then the digger in the sand pit. He couldn’t have been happier.

The following day, to shake things up, we went to Marlay Park instead.

Sometimes I forget I am his father and get anxious that he will get bored spending another morning with me. He doesn’t seem to have got bored with my company yet.

Still, on Thursday morning he wanted my phone to watch cartoons for a while before he would even consider getting out of the car. “It’s freezing outside,” he said.

I was expecting an ‘important’ work email from New York that I had to reply to before a print deadline passed.

This became worryingly problematic when I couldn’t get the phone off my son, and, worse, by the time he was finally bored with the cartoons the phone was dead.

Then he gave me that sheepish look which means only one thing. “I’ve did a pooh-pooh,” he said.

I changed his nappy in the back seat of the car before we went on our way to the playground. He raced ahead of me on his scooter, using his little foot as the brake. He turned around and looked at me. He said he wanted to play the game where I am the wolf and he is the police man and he chases after me while I run pretending to be the big bad wolf. So I did.

If you are feeling a bit low or out of sorts because of the pandemic — or if the blackness, the strange lethargy, the boredom, the hopelessness, and the relentless loneliness of living through Covid-19 is getting to you — then pretending to be a wolf as you run through Marlay Park with a threeyear-old son in hot pursuit is the best medicine.

My phone was dead so I could only imagine the texts and missed calls, whatever about emails from New

York, that were lying in wait.

As I ran through the park as a large canine on Thursday morning, I took all this as the universe’s way of reminding me that family is the most important thing in the world.

We then went to Dunnes in Nutgrove Shopping

Centre to buy pyjamas.

I got him a Thomas The

Tank Engine magazine. I got Uncut with Neil Young on the cover for myself. We both sat in the car and looked through our mags. We shared a moment.