Mr Mop

R and I took the Boy Wonder to Forest Farm this morning, for the first time in nearly a year. We were a little nervous - because of the canal, obviously, but also the extensive nettle beds - but he behaved very responsibly around the various dangers, carefully divided up a small bag of breadcrumbs among the different birds he saw, and charmed a whole tranche of passers-by with his bright and engaging chatter, so it was a thoroughly successful outing.

I was after dragonflies, obviously, but there were neither Golden-rings nor Darters to be seen, and the lone ovipositing female Emperor we spotted was moving too fast along the canal for me to catch up with her. The whole place was heaving with damselflies though, in sharp contrast to this time last year when they were present in distressingly small numbers, and I'm pretty confident that it will ultimately turn out to be a good dragon year at Forest Farm as well. My extra photo tonight is a female Beautiful Demoiselle, who was flashing her gorgeous iridescent wings at a nearby male, and demonstrating that the harsh, contrasty light photographers usually decry is sometimes no bad thing.

On our way back towards the car, B found a small willow branch on the path, bare but for a clump of leaves at one end, and picked it up. "No sticks," I said. "Why not?" said R. "He's fine." "OK," I said, conceding defeat to the combined forces of maleness, "but it's your responsibility." "Iss not a stick," interjected the Boy firmly. "Iss a mop." And then proceeded to mop the next couple of hundred metres of path, dipping the leaves in the canal like this whenever they were getting too dry.

I nearly broke into a recitation of The Walrus and the Carpenter during this performance, but I didn't feel B was quite ready for the oysters (frankly I'm still not tough enough to handle the oysters myself), and R was far too busy looking as though he was perfectly relaxed and not even thinking of interfering with B's fun, while actually keeping a hand poised within grabbing distance of his t-shirt, to want to be listening to poetry. My mental list of the horrors that would surely arise out of the game was left unticked: no-one fell in the canal, the Boy paused and held the branch out of the way whenever R asked him to so that innocent civilians could get past us unmopped, and when R reminded him that they'd reached the place where they had agreed the game would end, B obligingly said, "OK!" and threw the branch away.

Back at home the Boy wolfed down three servings of pesto pasta, taking the third one cold from the fridge rather than waiting for it to be warmed up, and then demolished my lunch time banana for good measure. It seems that you can work up quite an appetite, mopping a nature reserve.