Cakes at dawn

It's six thirty and son, eight, has just got his cakes into the oven. He's taken to baking in a big way. He does everything from turning on the oven measuring ingredients to getting them out at the end. And he's a very good baker. Daughter, 10, and friend are upstairs in bed, and won't get up until the very, very last minutes. He'll take them a warm cake later to try and winkle them out of their pits. But then this evening she'll have done her rugby, homework and story, and be busy practising for her gym competition and he'll be slumped in front of the telly, homework done as well as probably a bit of cartooning and some work on his scripts.

I'm very proud that they know who they are and that they don't feel constrained to live within any externally imposed paradigms. That's one of the great things about growing up now. I hope that as they approach their teens things will continue to be as rosy and they will continue to be as independent as they are.

My father, although he spent most of my childhood in the same job, never felt that he had finished looking for the next thing. He was a forester, a potter, a teacher, a diplomat, a dealer in ancient Chinese pottery, a calf farmer, a smallholder and then, in the decade before his death, a historian and biographer, publishing two books and becoming a renowned expert in two separate areas. My mother came in at the teacher stage, and totally supported him. She was for the most part a teacher, but in my childhood she was also, on our travels around the world, university lecturer, the editor of a literary review and a newsreader. Now retired she is a translator, sings in a choir, works for a charity providing funds for women who want to train themselves out of difficulties, is a school governor and more that I've forgotten. So when I announced I wanted to throw up a perfectly good career in IBM and retrain as a teacher, they totally supported and applauded me. And now Mum's too busy with her own life to follow my meanderings in and out of all my other endeavours. I hope to do the same for my chuldren. If they find their niche early in life, great, but if they never settle but always have the yen to try something new, well, it's in the genes.