While England were building up a half-time lead against Wales, Maisie and Billy sailed their pirate ship across the seven seas. They captured treasure ships and rode out great storms until they came to a tropical island. The sun shone high in the sky over a beach with glistening white sand. Maisie started to pull her socks off.
"Maisie! Maisie!" cried the pirate captain, her grandmother, fearing she'd catch a chill, as 2-year old pirate Maisie had had a stomach bug all week and not managed to keep her food down. "What are you doing? Why are you taking your socks off?"
"I'm going for a walk on the beach" said Maisie. And with that she leapt out of the pirate ship into the calm, shallow waters of the living room carpet and stomped up and down the white sands, between the easy chair where Grandad was asleep, one eye half open, and Auntie Sarah in her wheelchair.
There was a sequel. Three days later, long after the adult world knew how the second half of the rugby international turned out, Maisie ran up to her Mum and said, quite out of nothing in particular, "When we go on our holiday, I really am going to walk on the beach."
I have marvelled before at the sheer physical energy that my grandchildren put into their play and how utterly the imagination of the play is real to them, absorbing them completely. Actually, the day Wales embarrassed England in their first match of the Six Nations, it was Billy's fourth birthday. He'd no sooner opened the box with his new football boots in (with real screw-in studs), torn the wrapping from white socks, blue shorts and blue shirt, than he was stripped naked, scrumming to get his new kit on, grabbing his new ball and sprinting out for the back garden stadium, oblivious to the cold wind and the different rugby and soccer codes, shouting, "Grandad. Grandad. Come on. You're in goal", while waving at the uprights of his swing.
It all put me in mind of another little one, 25-years ago, who, on her back on the living room carpet, would flail her legs and arms in the air, struggling to roll over. Did she imagine sailing pirate ships and putting six goals past a hapless goal-keeper? And if not, how did her brain develop? How did she learn about the world and herself? How did she separate fact from fiction? How did she manage, days later to be thinking about her imaginary world and the real world and share the difference with her Mum? And if she did not do these things, what did Auntie Sarah in her wheelchair, watching her nephew and niece protectively as a good Aunt always does, make of their play-world, real-world now?
And another thing, why, as a society, do we still not show any convicted understanding of the vitality of the link between 'nature and nurture', of the importance of the physical and sensory in the engagement of self with the environment, that drives brain development, so that there should be initial training courses for those who would teach children with cerebral palsy, who can understand about pedagogy and the need for a structured curriculum, that deals with the integration of all aspects of the development of the brain and personality of the child with cerebral palsy? Never mind the schools and the SEN managers from the LEA who still will not talk to us at Paces, why are those who run the local Children's Centres likewise not beating a path to our door, seeking advice of our trained specialists? What can we do to change the professional mindset that does not see cerebral palsy as being potentially as much a developmental disorder as a physical one? Nor see, I was reminded last week, of the close inter-connection of all aspects of the education of the person, understood and advocated over 400 years ago by the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola - and asserted more recently and in our lifetimes by the founder of Conductive Education, Andras Peto?
Meanwhile, parents who do understand, who are faced with the reality, continue to struggle heroically against intransigent local education authorities, like the Ramsbottoms of Barnsley for the daughter Isabella.
I, of course, am not an expert, a specialist, a professional, an education officer, a consultant paediatrican, a politician. I'm just another irritating parent, and a soft-in-the-head Grandad. But if I know and can see with my own eyes what the ancient Greeks and Loyola and Peto knew, why can't you?
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