It is easy to get distracted from what really matters in life
For the first week of February, chez Gooch was a plague house. All of us were ill with a nasty gastric flu. My six-year-old daughter, normally a dynamo, spent an entire day lying on the sofa.
During this enforced sojourn, she engaged in that most underrated, and unjustly denigrated, of activities: staring out of the window. I used to do the same myself when I was poorly at home. There was a plum tree in our garden, and if you looked at it for long enough the smaller branches and twigs seemed to resolve themselves into shapes – a face, perhaps, or a bird. My daughter, for her part, discovered a very fat pigeon, which she named Sweets, sitting in the high boughs of a tall elder. Sweets has remained a conversation topic and is regularly sighted on his lofty perch. He seems to lead a relatively sedentary existence, only taking flight when it is absolutely necessary for him to do so.
