(But I will still need morning coffee)

People who have no children have a deep misunderstanding of what it is all about.

In their child imaginations, they make-believe how children will simply be there, maybe like surprising and dainty travellers they will lead through a journey, nicely skipping through summer, the supportive adult distributing fond knowing smiles, yet still busy about their day's purpose, considering perhaps a nice stroll, hand-in-hand, to a favourite cafe where mama will order Frappuccino Latte, Hot Chocolate and biscuits.

Well I was soon disabused of that idea. Thanks to the gritlets general and particular growing up, which has involved wrapping themselves round lamposts while screeching, knocking each other's teeth out, and coming down with three doses of chicken pox on Christmas day.

I have had to find ways to enjoy it all, one way or another, for the option has been a rope in the woods. But surprisingly, against my finer instincts which frequently tell me to run in the opposite direction and as far away from children as I can get, I find myself now bouncing along in their tow, enjoying the nonsense they get up to and the endless trouble they cause.

Like today. Fizzy comes round to join in the monthly wood thrashing and then, when she is properly brought into the ways of living in the wilderness, takes herself and the gritlets down the bottom of the garden to make a fire in the old barbeque tin, where they make soggy doughy bread, and discuss how they can all live in the garden over the summer, living on a diet of nettles and dandelion roots while their beds are composed of woven grass spread under the damson tree.

I listen to this while I stand there with a bucket of water in anticipation of the fire eventually igniting and burning us all to cinders, and I start to think it is a lovely Fizzyish idea, being able to live with the dark and light of the hours, watching the late-night birds settle and rise again, seeing the dusk fold into night. I could do all that, eating hawthorn and nettle for tea, filling my pockets with ripe damsons, then bedding myself down on springing grass to wake with the dawn.

For a moment it all makes sense. This is what children are for. They make the impossible, possible.