I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come indoors and played three games of chess, one game of Battleships, and several memory card games. I lost the football by 25 goals to 11, all three games of chess, saw my entire fleet sunk one after the other by a succession of direct hits, and my performance in the memory card games was irrefutable confirmation of my early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
After that we drove to the leisure centre for a swim. In the pool I was required among other things to crawl about on all fours underwater and be ridden like a horse. Back at home and ravenous after swimming, we ate beans on toast, and while we ate we played ‘I spy with my little eye’. I lost that too. Oscar spied with his little eye something beginning with ‘e for egg’, and after casting my exhausted little eye over every item on view in the kitchen or visible through the window, I had to give up. How silly of Grandad, we said, not to have realised the answer was ‘air’.
For the last hour before bedtime, we went in search of the last bear in England. We live close to the reputedly unusual geographical feature of a freshwater lake separated from the briny sea by a strip of land just 50–100 yards across. This narrow strip is pockmarked by shell-holes — now largely concealed by hawthorn bushes — made by the US army while practising for D-Day. We have long suspected that the last bear in England lives in one of these shell-holes because we have seen his huge pawprints on the muddy footpath (put there secretly by Grandad), also the remains of seagulls, his staple diet.
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