Just excellent
I had a 3.30pm appointment with Wilfred (aged 6 and 49 weeks). Usually he is too busy with after school club and his in-between lunch and dinner snack to meet at this time. Lockdown #3, however, has put the kibosh on after school club and Wilf had delegated the making of his afternoon snack to his mum, my sister, so I was granted a rare chat slot.
And he was early. The Skype call sounded at 3.25pm and I had to leap the abandoned hoover to get to the screen on time. At the moment, Wilf does not have any front teeth: there are emerging stumps but as he talks the main image is one of darkness between gleaming white incisors. Normally, this makes him look extra-adorable but when he gets cross those incisors and the dark space loom like the jaws of a great white shark. I wasn’t in trouble with Wilf today though so I only caught sight of his shark potential briefly when he leaned into the screen to ask about his birthday present. (Three weeks and counting.)
“Have you got me my tactical kit?” he asked.
“Um, well, I don’t to spoil a surprise but I have sent something to your mum.”
“I hope so,” he said, eyebrows raised in fierce expectation.
This is because (according to Wilf) we all let him down at Christmas. Wilf issued his gift list for Father Christmas, Mum and Dad, Gran and All The Rest of Us on September 9th. As far as he was concerned, this gave us ample time to get him the presents that he had politely listed. But a number of us went off-list and this caused Wilf, who is a very organised chap, great gloom on Christmas afternoon.
I did ring him on Boxing Day to explain why I had sent him a beautifully crafted mountain-shaped cushion instead of a SWAT team tactical vest complete with handcuffs but the cloud of misery didn’t lift and so I promised to make amends on his (February) birthday. And my sister now has a SWAT team police helmet (with tinted riot visor) hidden deep in her wardrobe.
My agenda for my afternoon tea-time appointment with Wilf was Something Good that had happened at school the day before. My sister had reported that Wilf had been praised by a teacher so I was keen to know more. First, though, I wanted to know about his snack. My sister’s face appeared upside down on the left of my screen: “I have been told to make pasta with tuna and sweetcorn,” she reported.
My face formed the open-mouthed, wide-eyed emoji, “What are you supposed to be doing?” I asked.
“My 2021 budget for work,” she said, withdrawing to the kitchen.
“Wow, Wilf,” I said. “That is a big snack.”
“Yep,” he said. “Because its ages until we have sausages and mash for dinner.”
I am fairly sure that the microphone detected a deep sigh from the kitchen along with a percussion of noises that made me wonder if my sister was trying to balance her laptop next to a saucepan of boiling pasta.
“So, Wilf, do you have something to tell me?”
He turned away for a minute to think. “Oh yes. I did a good thing yesterday.”
“And what was that?”
“Well, Miss Carter showed us a picture of a leaf with spikey edges and she asked us what other words we could use to describe the leaf. So I put my hand up and said ‘serrated’. Then Miss Carter told Mrs Hall and Mrs Hall said to me that I was the person to go to for long words. And I am.”
“Wilf, that’s fantastic!” I did a proud-aunt air-punch and some on-stool celebratory dancing that had Wilf shaking his head in dismay. “Serrated is a brilliant word: well done!”
Wilf and I then had a quick discussion about how many syllables make up “serrated”. Wilf thought six; I thought four and a disembodied hand delivered a huge bowl of pasta before we could google to investigate the right answer. Wilf waved goodbye from behind the pasta steam and ended the call so that he could watch some Star Wars with his grub.
I distracted myself from his sudden absence by checking the number of syllables in serrated. I knew that I was right - English teachers are always right about such things - but it is always good to verify your answer.
I was wrong: there are three syllables in serrated: ser-rat-ed. I reached for my phone to correct Wilf via my sister’s Whatsapp. And then I withdrew my arm. Quite suddenly, I could hear the voice of a much-loved ex-colleague, Linda. Linda started her teaching life in the year that I was born and I could hear her quite clearly saying something that she had told me in 2002, or thereabouts.
“There are times,” she said, “when excellent is enough. Not ‘excellent but’ or ‘excellent and’ or ‘excellent so next time’. No. Let a student feel their success. Just excellent.”
I closed my laptop and abandoned my phone on my desk. Wilf’s six syllable serrated was excellent. End of.