Casanova's sports day

As well as being Heather's birthday yesterday, it was also Isaac's first sports day at nursery.

Amusing is, I believe, the word I'm looking for, as a variety of one and two year olds were asked to sprint/toddle for twenty metres, with varying degrees of success, compliance, refusal and even tears.

(We won't dwell on my performance in the dads' hopping race. Suffice to say that trying to shift 17-plus stones' worth of weight on one of two dodgy knees was never going to result in a Usain Bolt-like performance. Move along, please.)

The afternoon also showed a lot about my son's character. He's not really one to go with the crowd, spending much of the afternoon roaming off in random directions. He then impatiently wriggled away from the start of his first race because it was taking too long to get everyone organised, before eventually gambolling away at a fair but not exceptional speed with the aid of his mother's hand.

Zac is many things: compliant is not one of them. He definitely seems to be more intelligent than most at this age, but with that comes an inquisitive mind and a tendency to want to understand and challenge whenever he is asked to do something; he's not wilfully disobedient, but he isn’t one for blindly following instructions either. I quite like that, although it can be hard work as a parent trying to get him from A to B sometimes.

And he is definitely starting to differentiate between Heather and I now. I think she summarised it best the other day when she said that he comes to her for attention and comfort, but when he wants to impress and seek approval he comes to me.

He really is so much fun at the moment, soaking up everything like a sponge and parroting everything you say back at you. Music has been his big thing for a while now; he instantly recognises his favourite songs, and regularly sings or hums in time (and in tune) with pop songs (current favourites: Lily Allen’s ‘Not Fair’, Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ and Irene Cara’s ‘Flashdance (What A Feeling)’, nursery rhymes or even the theme tunes of his favourite TV programmes. He is pronouncing polysyllabic words properly, having graduated from ‘ma-ee’ and ‘da-ee’ to a clear ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ - cute during the day, less so when shouted at you at 1am. And the phrases he has been taught at nursery, such as ‘Oh, dear me’ and ’Sorry, mummy’ remain an endless source of amusement.

On top of that, he is showing signs of becoming a real boy too. Okay, he’s not really shown any interest in football yet. But he loves rough-and-tumble physical play, and is starting to get very attached to his train track set and his building blocks. (I’ve been trying to teach him how to build a tall but stable tower; he hasn’t quite understood the principle of scaffolding yet, but I’m working on it.)

Funniest of all, he is already an incorrigible flirt. Whether it is a 2-year old girl or a 70-year old granny, he knows how to turn it on for the ladies. There is always a smile and a twinkle in his eye, and his favourite trick when meeting a female while out walking is to find a daisy or a dandelion and offer it to her. He’ll go far!

Sam Best-Shaw, RIP

I've just returned home from the memorial service for Sam, my friend from university who died last month with a brain tumour.

I've written elsewhere about how much it has affected me to lose a friend - albeit a recently distant one - of a similar age, and a fellow parent. More than I'd like to admit, certainly.

And so I found myself, along with maybe a hundred of Sam's friends and family, at his local church on an otherwise random Thursday afternoon. It was good to see so many making the small but not insignificant effort of attending to pay their respects; good too to see other old university friends who I hadn't met up with in some time, one of whom I hadn't seen since my stag night 12 years ago. (Although there is something especially sad when you look around the church and realise that half the people there are from the generation before: to my mind it goes against the natural order of things for the old to have to mourn the young.)

But anyway. We sang. We listened to stories and recollections from Sam's life. And we remembered.

And once the first memory was stirred, so many came flooding back. Countless evenings drinking cheap beer in the Union bar. Sam's rickety room on staircase 15 with the uneven floor, and the month it got taken over by the Lib Dems as their campaign base for the council elections. College discos (they were called 'sweaties', for obvious reasons), balls and other events. Summer afternoons punting zig-zaggedly on the Cherwell drinking Pimms, or at the Parks watching cricket. Our ritual end-of-term night out at a local Chinese restaurant called Dear Friends, where we would order dishes with the aid of a random number generator and then stay up all night playing games. Conversations about music ranging from the banal to the surreal: tracing all the historical references in Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start The Fire', for instance, or arguments about why the Stranglers were, as Sam would vehemently argue, the best band in the history of pop. (Hearing 'Always The Sun' playing out of the speakers as the last act of the service was the final straw for me, bringing tears to my eyes and triggering a second wave of memories.)

But then, of course, that's the point of a memorial service: you remember. And in the rekindled personal memories of a hundred or more people this afternoon, Sam lives on.

It's not much, but then again maybe it is.

Samuel Stevenson Best-Shaw

Husband of Elena

Father of Adam and Rebecca

1971-2009

RIP