Say Cheese For Nanny

I spent a lot of today with granddaughter Rose. I took her to her dance class in Cupar this morning and , amongst other things in the fun filled hour, enjoyed singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (as well as doing all the actions) and doing a toddler caterpillar conga where I, as both the only man there and the only person over thirty five, must have looked slightly incongruous. Fortunately nobody asked me if I'd missed my way to the bowling green and Rose had a lovely time.

She's grown up in the two months since we were last here in St Andrews. She's not that much taller but she's got more teeth (as demonstrated in her photo for Nanny above) and her talking has come on in leaps and bounds. I haven't experienced a child so small holding a proper conversation and speaking in sentences of half a dozen words or more before (and she's grammatically correct too). It must be in the genes. Or there again it could be because Sarah and Duncan have been such attentive parents. She's going to be a wonderful big sister when her new sibling arrives in the autumn.

After we got back from Cupar I did a further short stint of babysitting. Rose enjoys being read to whilst sitting on a huge beanbag that Sarah and Duncan have in their lounge. Sitting in the beanbag and reading the story is fine but getting out of the beanbag is another matter and, enveloped in it's folds, I felt like I was drowning in a giant blancmange and had visions of having to call for assistance to get out of the damn thing. Fortunately a puzzled Rose, who is used to her parents springing out of the bag in a trice, offered me a hand and I somehow extricated myself from its clutches. I think we'll read tomorrow's story on the sofa.

After that it was another three hour bike ride before returning to the caravan for tea. I was going to watch TV but there's nothing on that I fancy. Last night I started to watch The Fall on BBC2. I only lasted five minutes. The sadistic sexual assault and murder of a young woman and her subsequent immersion in a bath for some sort of ritual cleansing made me wonder why everyone is surprised when people like Stuart Hazell and Mark Bridger do the sort of things they do. I am certainly no prude but to go into such detail was simply uncalled for at best and voyeuristic at worst.