False Alarm

It is very easy, and natural, for people to become conditioned by the environment around them.

Whereas I was initially thinking about this in terms of our recent experience with Capucine and Gaston and the knock on effects of this on Maxime, it seems like the Economist also agrees.... http://www.economist.com/node/18226813?story_id=18226813 An interesting article which basically concludes that “lonely people...are at greater risk than the gregarious of developing illnesses associated with chronic inflammation, such as heart disease and certain cancers.... over a period, a gregarious person has a 50% better chance of surviving than a lonely one.... What Dr Cole seems to have revealed, then, is a mechanism by which the environment (in this case the social environment) reaches inside a person’s body and tweaks its genome so that it responds appropriately. It is not that the lonely and the gregarious are genetically different from each other. Rather, their genes are regulated differently, according to how sociable an individual is." Anyway, back to the topic in hand....

What got me thinking about this knock on impact on Maxime was our visit to the Carnival in Bayonne yesterday. After arriving I popped Maxime on my shoulders and we walked for 15 minutes or so to the main centre of activity near the merry go round. I put Maxime down and off he ran towards it. Three steps later his legs collapsed and he fell over. Assuming he had tripped up, I put him back on his feet and set him off again. Another three steps and the same thing, this time holding the back of his knee with cries of “mal, mal, moi mal”. Despite being disgusted by this immediate desire to speak French, I gave him a little hug and set him on his way for a third time. When he fell over again, my new instinctive reaction was to fear the worst. I nervously turned to Sandie and we both looked at each other fearing that a trip to our friends at Bayonne hospital was on the cards..... A concerned second or two passed, and then Sandie suddenly then had the presence of mind to realise that the little man was probably suffering from pins and needles in his legs as a result of sitting on my shoulders for so long. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The choice was easier for Sandie, she burst into a fit of uncontrollable giggling at my unnecessary worrying.

But as they say, he who laughs last laughs loudest. Just before we left the carnival Maxime went on the bouncy castle. I watched Sandie, who had decided earlier in the week that we both needed to be more severe with Maxime, issue three two minute warnings to him over the course of about nine minutes. Finally she realised that the only way to get him back, (by now he had gone all the way to the back wall of the castle), was to take her shoes off and go in and drag him out. She went in purposefully, but was soon to be seen bobbing up and down negotiating with Maxime, tears of laughter streaming down her cheeks. Aidan 1, Sandie 1. That said it was clear that the overall winner that day was his nibs himself.