Ode to violence and death

"Nice Easter hols?" I ask my friend (lets call her 'B') as we stand on the Tube platform.

We're on our way to a performance of Beethoven’s 9^th at the Royal Festival Hall.

“Well, we did have a bit of a drama,” says B.

We have to sit apart on the train so I'm left to ruminate.

Washing machine broke down? Lost the internet? That’s what used to constitute a drama for we stay-at-homes. But it turns out, since we now have children of a ‘going out by themselves’ age, there’s a whole new raft of terrifying possibilities.

When we finally get seats together she says her middle child was hit by a car. He ran across on a red man. Now that’s a drama.

When they’d got over the shock and realised he was okay the telling-off kicked in. Perhaps that wonderfully illogical standby, “I’ll kill you if you do that again!”

Meanwhile friend K, sitting on my other side (I’m the filling in this drama sandwich) says a pleasant Easter walk over fields near where her parents live turned nasty when the family dog caught a baby deer. And ate it. Right in front of the children. And they’d barely got over the mouse-release-on-the-common, trauma.

Her eldest is sensitive. He insisted that a mouse, caught in a trap at home but still alive, should be released back into the wild. The chosen site had to be three miles from home or the mouse might find its way back and start chewing through Weetabix packets again. Really.

So they released it up on the tennis courts on the common watching as it scuttled happily away. (Or perhaps that should be limped, due to the trap?) Anyway, a great big crow promptly swooped down and nabbed it.

I opined that sometimes these stories run in threes and so it was because K then told us another involving the same little boy, a fat, happy pigeon on a chimney pot, and a peregrine falcon. I don’t think I need elaborate; you get the picture.

And my offering? Well, since that chat on the Tube - but also during the Easter hols - Eldest was mugged. Again. Third time.

The good news is that when he went back with his Dad to find his lovely new, green hoodie (from Top Man) it was still lying where it had been abandoned near the scene of the crime. That skate park fraternity is a nice lot. Never any bother there - it’s just getting to and from that’s the problem.

So, that’s Easter: injury, death and the threat of violence - about right then.

Oh to joy.