Killing Time

Friday is filled with rain.
 It's the kind of rain that falls in thick, never ending streams. 

It feels serious.
So, a walk around the museum to wander around the collected past of my town and other parts of the world.
I decide that today is a day for the art world, so I make my way to the top floor. I'm in the mood for  still life , abstraction and the visions of  those who can capture the often unseen in life.
I'm in the mood for quiet contemplation on the imagery and meaning held within the gilt frames and shaped materials on display.

 What I forget is that it's Easter holidays.

I forget that places like this will be the haunt of the bedraggled parent and grandparent.
 The kingdom of the displeased and unquiet child. Sure enough, my first ten minutes are an unexpected insight in to the workings of parent and child relations. Sobs, squarks, runnings about to name but a few some of the activities going on around me. Couple that with wanton disobedience and  that thing that kids do when you get more than two in the same place; they turn into pinballs in a big pinball machine. All over the place with enviable freedom. This secretly delights me. Not because I especially enjoy watching children run about, no. It's for different reasons. One, they're not my children and two, there's something in watching sensible and responsible adults trying to impose their attitudes on little four year old  pinballs of I don't care.
The game goes on until someone tilts it.

I stand in the middle of this like the uncle who's got no kids but has  been dragged along to share in the joys of it all.

Eventually, the shepherds somehow gather their flock together and herd them off to bother the the Ancient Britons downstairs.

I drift into ceramics only to be confronted  with another cohort of small voice boxes. These, however, are in a different situation. As the others were free to roam, these are on the school trip. Like tiny offenders on community service, they wear fluorescent waistcoats and  are guarded by young women who do the responsible adult thing but have hairstyles that want me to know they are fun people really.

 Prisoners already kids. 

They drift around the 17th Century table ware displays like an unsteady dayglo knee high cloud amid the oohs and ahhhs of the captors. The cloud slowly dissipates and I am ,for the last five minutes, left pretty much alone. 

As I make my way back down the stairs, I catch up with two of the straggling mini convicts and one unlucky  guard , left behind to assist in the tackling of the stairs. One of them informs me that he is  a"big boy " for walking down the stairs , his screw informs me that she is "sorry" that it's taking so long. I inform both that it's ok because, it is.

Out into the steady downpour again, I make my way back to my own prisoners who await my rfeturn. Their crimes? Not understanding the inferred and how to use  the apostrophe correctly.

Their sentence.....Life