Stuck on a Monument

Even the car looks relieved as it pulls into our drive and kids ooze, tumble out. Welcome hugs. A long drive after a committee decision, ‘Let’s visit Poppa’.
Committee decisions, no one is actually in charge, there is a moment of each looking at the other, ‘Now wot?’ followed by chatter, dawdling inside and clattering down the stairs.
Food.
No-one is in charge of lunch. No person has come out in spots deciding on a menu, facing the ‘I don’t like’, and propelling a trolley through Covid quivering crowds.
Fridge, larder, dining table fruit bowl, Poppa’s home made bread, oh – and the pizza and peanut brownies. Real peanut brownies. No brownies were harmed in following the Edmund’s recipe. Just as my Mum did.
Family news, small groups form, young ones talk of things that for me, a wrinkled Poppa, are now above my head.
A walk. An explore around the older parts of Thames. A&G Price, an enormous and old building where, when ‘Poppa was a boy’ real steam locomotives were manufactured. And today there is still evidence of railway lines. You know when I grow up I’m going to be a steam train driver.

Small boys excel in getting lost. Disappearing from . And the site. While some could become anxious hardened old tuskers like Poppas, small boy graduates, are relaxed. A chance to sit down. After all Thames, New Zealand, was discovered by big boys getting almost lost. And lost boys have an inborn GPS. A tummy. Time and hunger lures small boys homewards.
The boys emerge clutching trophies of interesting stones and unidentified discarded objects.
The kids stuffed into the car, we drive up to the monument and view of the Firth of Thames. Ponder, what did it look like in Capt. Cook’s day? We read how in those early ventures the noise of native birds in those uncut forests was almost too hard to bear.
A view of the rooftops of the businesses along the main street of Thames. The Thames cinema looks enormous. Deceptive from inside the four auditoriums. Sadly in a few weeks to be permanently closed. Cinema survived TV but at home streaming devices have turned the current.
Monuments are sacred places. Monuments are climbed by small boys. Yes a boy gets stuck. We wish him well. We promise, at home, to raise our plate of cake in memory of a climber who failed to unclimb.