Squaring circles

We met when our firstborns were three months old. After that we spent almost every day together, at theirs, at ours, in the park, in the rec... They were clowns and our days were full of magic: objects that disappeared and reappeared, balancing acts and silly games.

I thought our firstborns would never be able to grasp science, so unpredictable and illogical was the small world that was magicked around them.

When the firstborns were nearly three, their family moved to the Netherlands. It was a huge wrench for all of us. Whenever we managed to meet up after that, there or here, the firstborns picked up as if they'd never been apart.

That was three decades ago and the firstborns are now about as old as we were then. I haven't seen my co-mum for over ten years but we met today and tramped in the rain round our old places in Brixton, some now magicked into new forms, some disappeared, some full of memories, some utterly forgotten.

The world turns. And the firstborns are an engineer and a physicist. That's pretty magic.


Black and white in colour 179