Wonderlust

My daughters are gobsmacked by new discoveries every day. Their gobsmackery is manifested on a sliding scale between pure delight and abject terror.

Grown-ups encounter new things far less frequently than children. But occasional moments of gobsmackery permeate the adult defences too.

Today I discovered these beauties at the farmer's market.

Stargazing.

Aren't they gorgeous? Like constellations of stars marauding as berries.

I've been staring at them all afternoon with a childish grin. They taste good - about how you would expect Cassiopeia to taste if Cassiopeia were made of albino currants and not stars.

Greengages, a fruit I only had the pleasure of meeting in recent years, had a similar initial effect on me. Greengages are such a counter-intuitive plum - they look for all the world like unripe apricots and taste like heaven.

Even more wonderful than greengages is Kid, Ana's imaginary friend who lives in her hand. As with so many wonderful characters in this world, I met Kid on a bus. Not a Greyhound on smoke break in Kansas City at 4am, but rather Ana's first red double-decker through the big smoke.

As we sat at the very top by the window and she told me repeatedly that we were going to London on the bus (we were in fact in London already, but she was impervious to this suggestion). Then, beaming delightedly, she extended her hand out to the window, shaped like a shadow puppet.

A kid's Kid. 

'Look Kid,' she said. 'Look at that! We're going to London, Kid!'

I love Kid. I ask to talk to him all the time, and if Ana is in a good mood she indulges me. She understands that one should respect the hand that feeds. You see, while Kid inhabits her right hand, Kid's Mama inhabits her left.

Today's currants made me recall two of my own favourite moments of adult wonder.

Ana, an abstract free-form scribbler of the Jackson Pollock school, recently sat down of her own accord and - with grown-up-like concentration - drew a discernible person on paper for the first time. 'Look Mama,' she said with authority, 'it's WALL-E.'

And indeed, there was no mistaking WALL-E. I was gobsmacked with delight.

WALL-E (and EVE).

Around the same time, Ali toddled over to the sliding glass door of our old house. She gazed up at the sky and pointed.

'Moon!' she whispered in pure delighted wonder. She'd never said the word before, identified any celestial bodies, or frankly appeared to have much interest in them.

Then she toddled off and began shouting at her blocks in spite of my best efforts to prologue the magic by sitting at the window and shouting 'MOON!' in that silly undignified fashion that only gobsmacked parent would do.

Both moments passed in a blink. The girls have forgotten. Till the currants today, I had forgotten too.

In fact, at this juncture any sensible reader might bang her head against the wall and demand to know why these mundane moments are worth remembering at all.

And my response to all this imaginary head-banging is this: because these were not isolated moments at all. Instead they were ripples from two monumentally wondrous moments. Twice in my life I have hovered over a newborn daughter, gazing in wonder at her perfect sleeping face for the first time.

It doesn't get more wonderful than that.

Of course birth is followed by years in the wilderness. No sooner does the midwife say 'Congratulations, it's a girl!' then you are rushed onto a waiting boat in the Thames and shipped off to years of hard labour with added ketchup in a Tasmanian penal colony.

Which is why savouring these moments of wonder is so important.

Parenthood is the act of jumping from sweet moment to sweet moment like a game of hop-scotch played over a lava field.

In fact life in general is a confusing cocktail of tragedy and wonder. Which is easy to remember on grim news weeks like this one. All that matters is loving the people we love. And making valiant efforts to love everybody else too.