Everything is smaller and dirtier than I remember. Hotter, too, we've arrived in the middle of a heatwave. Strapping a baby to your chest and jumping on a bus is cheaper than the sauna, but somehow less replenishing.
Ten days of touristing to go.
-1-
London Zoo. F is about a foot and a half away from a ring-tailed lemur. It's squatting in the undergrowth next to the path inside the free-roaming enclosure, gnawing on the husk of some kind of fruit, eyes like tiny black marbles and the face of a wizened toddler. F makes an 'awww, cute' squeaky noise of excitement.
The lemur looks at her and makes pretty much the same noise back.
The two of them converse briefly before the lemur goes to pick and eat lice out of its friend's coat. Later that night, as part of an entirely different conversation, I ask F what she wants to be when she grows up, she says "ring-tailed lemur."
-2-
C's cousin H spots her across the room and shouts her name triumphantly, then launches herself into a huge, vigorous hug. The kind where you dig your heel into the back of the other person's knee in order to get extra purchase. C isn't quite able to provide the same kind of support as an adult, somehow, and over they both go.
Half an hour later, when Cousin H spots C again, C edges round to the other side of the coffee table and smiles politely.
Meanwhile, F and Cousin S are playing tigers under the same coffee table. A polite discussion is had with them regarding the correct use of fingernails during a playful scratch after I lose a small piece of my nose.
-3-
F wades deeper into the stream, leaving a turbid cloud in the water behind her. The cloud drifts towards the row of stones at the side of the pool, slowly dispersing through the gaps and being replaced by clear water.
The hedgerow swaying with murmuring bees, the brook chuckles and gurgles. We wade about with Cousin D and Uncle P, any skin not covered by the icy water sweltering. F catches some stones, a dead slug and much slime. D catches tiny shrimp-like things, larval stages of some beetle or other in their transparent early life.
I remember a lot of dam building from my own youth. Eternities of it, some afternoons, sluicing about in the river Tay during low summers or lurching round foresty streams with my trousers rolled up. Where has my energy gone? Why am I not crashing to all fours to lever up a boulder and plug that last gap? I just want to lurch home and avoid sunstroke. Staying up until two in the morning having a drunken conversation about the monarchy with Aunty R probably didn't help. My sweat is probably poisoning those poor water lice even now.
Happy all the same, though. Because F is.
-4-
"Ooowlou!" squeals C, pointing.
"Oh look!" I repeat after her. "Yes, that's a silver necklace in the shape of a human heart!"
The shop outside the Evolution of Man exhibition has gone all pseudo-victorian with its tat. Steampunk skull ashtrays and collections of empty specimen bottles to drink cold brewed coffee out of, through the fronds of your hipster Darwin beard. C is loving it. She slept through the earthquake bit earlier, wasn't too impressed by the gemstone hall (who is?) but this is a shop. C likes shops.
"Ooowlou!" she says again.
"Daddy, I haven't got one of these at home so I want one," F says, brandishing god alone knows what. A biro with a mangy peacock feather tail? A human cranium ashtray? A tea towel printed with a diagram of Huxley's arse? Memory fails me. Nothing anyone without a certain level of disposable income could justifiably want or need. That's not me. The only disposables I do these days are nappies.
-5-
We go to Hamleys. Part of me never comes out.
-6-
H and E are playing vigorously with F, who is doing her best to keep up with the two older children despite being tired, too hot and massively overstimulated. Round the back of the Naval Museum in Greenwich is a cafe, where V, S and I sit and chat as C smears cake and ice cream over her face happily.
Their game is tickling. Having established that I am ticklish, they are chasing each other around by the long terraced fountain beside the cafe poking each other gleefully and trying not to let their shrieks become screams.
It's very good to see old friends again. S and her husband I along with their children H and E today, CC from drama school the day before, Clara's godfather J for the first time and the CMDEB family unit (families look like items from the Christmas Honours list in my shorthand. Commanders of the Militarily Distinguished Empire Brigade, all of them) later in the week. People I now cling to contact with via Facebook or Whatsapp, instead seeing regularly as I'd like. So many children, alarmingly energetic miniatures of their parents with the same traits, the same smiles, all new purpose and (generally but not exclusively, and certainly compared to me) more hair and better waistlines.
F later recalls this as her favourite favourite moment of the week. "I was so so happy," she says, "playing tickling by the fountain. We should get a fountain like that for our house. We can have it outside the balcony." I notify the local council on our return to Sweden.
-7-
Melted ice cream on the Southbank. People grabbing cheeky pints from the Founders Arms, then chugging off along the river in motor cruisers. A tired round of applause for the anticlimactic end of some hyperactive street performance. Someone selling the world's smallest kite at the end of the Blade of Light bridge. London, as sweaty, boisterous, dangerous, swarming and cheerful as I ever remember it, a wonderbox of nostalgia and a paean to going home all at once.
V pops into a shop, a Tesco somewhere on Poultry. For fifteen minutes, I juggle both C and F, trying to get them to sing or guess the incoming bus number. Nearby, someone plays dance music at a boggling volume. The sky is mostly blue, but filtered through dust, fumey heat and ominously tarnished clouds, it fits over the city like the lid of a dry well.
Moments away from tantrums, V arrives, then the no. 8 bus. F is furious that someone is sitting in her seat (top front) and somehow makes them get off early through focussed venom. "I can see everything!" she declares, proudly.
-8-
In the back garden of my aunt and uncle M&M's house, F and C play with a tub of water and a now-antique toy. A red plastic hippo with paddling feet, wound up by pulling a duck on a string out of his mouth. In the bath in Sevenoaks, against a tiled vista of an exotically white sanded beach and years ago, he would swim down the string and eat the duck. Three of his feet are missing, but none of the essential joy of his existence.
Later, walking along the Greenway as we come back from the Olympic parks, C starts singing along with us, copying the words and music as best she can. One of those toddlery approximations that sounds like garbage and makes you feel like you've birthed Mozart. Bje-dje-djoy-zhoy-zhoy-zhoydjizyoy!
-9-
A last day. Exhausted after over a week of thundery sun and childbearing, I stay at home to watch Ceebeebies with the girls as Mummy goes to John Lewis. F likes seeing new cartoons in English, especially ones she knows in Swedish at home. Tree Fu Tom gets extra yoga-powered support here, and she bemoans the fact that she won't be able to watch the Lingo Show in Gothenburg.
C attempts the stairs, when she isn't attempting the oven, the bins or the back garden. She strips cd cases from the shelves and hurls them at the walls, laughing delightedly. If she sleeps, F wakes. If F sleeps, C wakes. Neither of them seem to enjoy any food that isn't ice cream any more. "I don't want to go home to Gothenburg," F says, "I want to have my own room here with stairs and a rainbow quilt."
I will miss London too, fiercely on occasion, but probably not for several months.
-10-
C points up and says "Oh luh!", her face transformed by wonder. It's her house! She lives here! In ten days, she's survived chickenpox, seen various new worlds and modes of living and probably eaten at least one fridge magnet because I'm sure there were seven not six when we arrived in Bow. And she's taller, more confident and much more chatty, not that she was doing badly in any of those stakes when we left. Travel broadens the child, it seems.
Borta bra, hemma bäst.
