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In the sports hall a thin middle-aged man called Richard was hopping up and down on one leg while holding his arms out to twist an imaginary steering wheel. Before him, an unruly row of four-year olds enthusiastically tried to copy, with mixed results. And seated behind the children was a row of parents sceptically eyeing the go-karts being heaved into position by Richard’s Slavic assistant (when we’d received the invitation to Maya’s Go-Kart Birthday Party, we’d all assumed they’d be little pedal jobs, rather than these motor racers which looked much too big and complicated and dangerous for our darlings).

“Good, so we can all do two things at once,” said Richard, apparently satisfied that their performance in the hoppy-twisty exercise qualified the children to drive. Referring to a list of names, he then tried to divide the children into groups of four. Richard was softly spoken and communicated mostly by flapping his hands. When his hands weren’t flapping they were clasped tightly together. He wore red overalls and a whistle around his neck. Some of the children obediently sat on their designated team mat, others continued the hopping exercise with renewed vigour. We parents shuffled in our plastic chairs. Perhaps sensing our discomfort, Richard explained that he had a Big Red Button which made all the karts stop at once in case of emergency.

When C got into her go-kart she initially failed to grasp that pressing the foot pedal made it go. The boy in the kart behind did, however, and on Richard’s whistle he ploughed violently into her back bumper. Richard pressed his Big Red Button. It was touch and go for a moment, I could see C’s bottom lip quivering and her head going down. But the Slavic assistant was over in a flash: he gave her quick, wordless instructions and off she went, pootling around the track with, it turned out, remarkable competence. The girls were generally very good at driving; the boys, less so. In fact, with the boys it was the most appalling carnage. No sooner had the Slav hauled one of them out from underneath the inflatable barrier and back onto the track, then another would charge off it, grinning stupidly. Smash, boom, bash, crash, they went, turning their steering wheels at random or not at all while we now-relaxed parents roared with laughter and an increasingly harassed Richard hammered his Big Red Button as if he were playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the ZX Spectrum.

Afterwards, when the children were tucking into their party tea, I approached Richard to thank him for his heroic efforts. “I suppose four year-olds are the youngest that can do this?” I said. “Yes, that’s right” he replied. Then added, “Yes indeed”, with feeling. Up close I could see he was a bit older than I’d originally thought, pushing sixty. He had the air of a man who’d spent most of his life in garages quietly tinkering with engines and spanners, and further than that, as he gathered an armful of plastic medals to dish out to the tots, the faraway look of one who can’t quite recall which decisions or fateful twists have led him to this highly improbable Sunday afternoon.

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But then life is one improbability on top of another, all the way down to the fathomless final improbability. As I boy I found that an extra puff or two on the inhaler which kept my asthma in check could induce a state of gentle transcendence, and it was in one such Ventolin high that I first experienced the full force of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I didn’t put it into words as such, but I felt the vertiginous weirdness of the fact of existence, of why it wasn’t the case that there was Nothing, and, tumbling through the final madness-inducing hoop, not Nothing meaning just empty space or timeless time but a proper, real Nothing,  whereby even ‘nothing’ would be meaningless because there would be no concept of not-nothing, nor anything to not conceive that non-concept. And, I saw as I continued that black plummet, Nothing should surely be the default position and the miracle of ‘not nothing’ requires a damn good explanation.

It was almost certainly this dreadful recurring existential experience that cut away the foundations of my hitherto unexamined religious assumptions, as the Christian teachings in church or at St John’s school seemed laughably to beg the question, and ultimately led to my studying philosophy at university. But then later I also lost interest in philosophy, which could  only keep asking the same question in slightly less clunky ways. Scientism is no alternative to religion since no theory of physics however bizarre or wonderful can provide an answer to that bottommost question, and all of science’s pronouncements are ultimately piddling. You may as well stick with Christianity, which at least has saints and history and a consoling attitude to the void and none of scientism’s naffness. Come to think of it, Ventolin High sounds like the sort of thing that the New Atheists would rename St John’s.

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“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'”
“The mood will pass, sir.”

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

***

I pass a few high schools on my way to work and sometimes I notice a particular boy walking along, and I notice him because he is very self-assured with a pile of aristocratic blond hair and what is striking about him is that he looks not like a boy at all but like a miniature version of his future middle-aged self. When he is middle-aged and is a successful barrister or hedge-fund manager or charity director, his friends will see photographs of his schoolboy person and laugh about how he’s hardly changed a bit, always was older than his years etc. But seen from this end it is eerie.

***

He looks like a Sebastian, in other words. Sebastian is one of those names that conveys a full personality type on its bearer from the off, as does Quentin, Crispin, and, to slightly lesser extent, Julian. Tristram is another. Take Dr The Hon Tristram Hunt MP, the new shadow education minister. He really is a Tristram: occasional historian, former Cambridge footlight, amateur gentleman, man about town, ought to have a valet. His father is called Julian and happens to be a Labour Life Peer. Tristram is one of a bunch of Labour ‘princelings’ in or close to parliamentary careers, including Euan Blair, Will Straw, Emily Benn and David Prescott. This kind of ‘career politician’ is widely detested by the public, but Hugo ‘’C’mon, can’t we all, y’know, be reasonable” Rifkind (son of Malcolm) writes an uncharacteristically noteworthy piece in The Spectator arguing that it’s illegitimate to complain about the ‘closed shop’ of politics unless you personally have had a crack at opening the door and failed. This strikes me, on reflection, as twaddle, since if the political parties are continually parachuting nepotistic candidates and special advisers into safe seats then straight to the front benches, then clearly the message is that it’s a closed shop and we have every right to harp on about the demographics of our executive as much as we like from the comfort of our own armchairs; I mean, is this a democracy or what?

***

James Delingpole (who is to Hugo Rifkind what Margaret Thatcher was to Ian Gilmour) predicted in his gloriously undiluted polemic Watermelons that once the scientific case for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming caused by carbon emissions becomes untenable there will be no question of the green industry saying “Turns out we overegged that climate disaster business somewhat so you can scrap all those cripplingly expensive carbon reductions schemes now. Sorry about that.” Instead, ‘scientists’ (such a useful word) will find new catastrophes for which to blame capitalist industrial western modernity, and the Armageddon stories will switch from global warming to something else, so that we can all continue to flagellate ourselves and ban things and tax things. But that’s all paranoid conspiracy-theory nonsense, of course….

***

At Avon Valley Country Park we watched the pig race and then wandered over to the chickens to see if there were any eggs in the boxes. If you can find an egg you can take it home. The girls stood on tiptoes to peep, and C felt around in the straw. Nothing. We went back to the indoor play area. My daughters have quite different personalities: E is scared of everything, C of nothing. Within ten minutes C had me dropping her off the fastest vertical death slide, watched with undisguised horror by her mother. Even before she crashed into the ballpool at the bottom C was turning to grin back at me in triumph. On the way out we took a quick last look in the egg boxes, just on the off chance, and what do you know, there was an egg! And then another! No Euromillions winner can ever have been more delighted than my girls. “You can have them boiled for your tea,” I said. They cheered. C insisted on carrying the eggs, one in each hand, back to the car, and no amount of offering or entreating by mummy, daddy, grandma or Auntie K could induce her to part with them. One egg was squat and pale, the other long and brown. All the way home C managed to keep them safe, even during the tricky transfer from her car seat to the pavement and into the house. In the kitchen the girls danced around impatiently shouting ‘Egg!’ while the pan of water boiled, then when at last the eggs were just right, runny but not too runny, and had cooled to just the right temperature they sat at the table to receive that unimprovable time-honoured tea: a boiled foraged egg in an eggcup with soldiers. Whereupon they ate one mouthful each and called for pudding.

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