My secret weapon in the battle of the alpha papas... ice cream
Another weekend, another ornamental gardens, overlooked by a beautiful yet temporarily closed mansion house. This set-up has formed the staple of our weekend entertainment over the last year.
Unfortunately, there are drawbacks and one emerged last weekend, in the form of an over-enthusiastic father determined to demonstrate both his athleticism and parenting abilities.
He first came to my attention when he ran past us, racing his offspring up endless tiers of stone steps.
Immediately, Emma looked at me and said, “let’s run, daddy”. Obviously, I obliged and started sprinting upwards followed by the twins, only to find they were quicker than me and not perspiring heavily.
As the fitter father disappeared into the distance, I pretended to look at a big flowery bush to regain composure and put some distance between us, so I wouldn’t be forced into competition again. Obviously, we turned the next corner and alpha papa was leaping across a stream, much to the delight of his children.
Naturally Thomas ran over to jump the water, followed swiftly by Victoria shouting, “careful, don’t fall in”. He didn’t fall in but did trudge through some foul-smelling mud, which stayed with us for the reminder of the day.
The rival family moved onto ‘Pooh Sticks’, a sport popularised by Winnie the Pooh in the AA Milne books.
They were happily dropping sticks off the bridge into the water and excitedly watching to see whose appeared first on the other side. This time Emma let our family down by throwing a handful of gravel into the bubbling brook, followed by Thomas chucking a small tree over the bridge.
We soon got to an idyllic grassy meadow, dotted with nice quiet people who didn’t make me feel insecure about my enthusiasm for being a father and my enemy, who was making a holy show of himself by chasing around pretending to be a dinosaur.
Immediately, I noticed both the ice cream kiosk and the opposition family eating carrot sticks and houmous.
Without a second thought, I ordered ice creams in chocolate waffle cones with fudge sticks for all of us in an overly-flamboyant manner, made a show of handing them out and waited.
It wasn’t long before I heard my nemesis’ offspring whinging for ice cream and knew I’d won one round in my imagined battle of the dads.