Lunch with the family and my great-nephew Louis tells me about ‘enchanting’. Apparently, enchanting is a thing. You can enchant all manner of objects and people. He looks at me with serious eyes. ‘You can enchant pickaxes,’ he says.
‘How do you do the enchanting?’ I ask, fascinated.
‘Well,’ he says, giving this some thought. ‘You have to sing quite a lot of songs. Some of the songs are quite silly.’
‘Goodness,’ I say.
We pause, and contemplate the singing of the silly songs.
Then I ask, ‘How did you learn all this?’
He shakes his head, from side to side and up and down, and he smiles a secret smile to himself. ‘I didn’t learn it,’ he says. ‘I just know.’
How lovely, I thought, to have all that knowing so securely inside you.
Louis was seven a week ago. All the other children I see - the extended family, the posse - are quite grown-up now, nearly all teenagers. I had rather forgotten that wonderful world of magic that small children inhabit so easily and so completely.
After we have finished with the enchanting, Louis shows me a picture he had drawn of a ‘horse farm’. It is very detailed, and very exciting. He points out all the different buildings. ‘This is an underground farm,’ he says.
‘So it is,’ I say. ‘Just like all those end of the world bunkers the tech billionaires are building in New Zealand.’
He brushes aside such frippery.
‘This,’ he says sternly, pointing, ‘is the fossil farm and this is the lava farm. And here are the sheep and here are the cows.’
‘I like the fossil farm,’ I say. ‘Do you grow the fossils yourself?’
‘No,’ he cries, in disdain. ‘You have to dig them up. With pickaxes.’ It seems that pickaxes are a bit of a theme. That’s why there is, on the farm, a ‘welding shed’. He is going to make many different tools, some of them ‘multi-purpose’, so that he can do all the digging which is required.
‘I might,’ he says dreamily, ‘find some obsidian.’
‘Obsidian!’ I say, delighted. ‘That is one of my favourite words. I only knew what it meant about ten years ago. And you know, at the age of seven.’
He nods, forgiving me my years of ignorance.
His mother laughs, fondly.
‘Do you really know what it is?’ She says. ‘Or did you just hear the word?’
He shoots her a mournful look of deep reproach.
‘It’s a special kind of rock,’ he says, as if a little tired of having to teach his grandmother to suck eggs. ‘And it is deep purple.’