The overnight guest

The grandson was delivered on Friday with the message, ‘please retain and amuse till tomorrow’, six words designed to instil fear and dread in the elderly. To be fair though, such a visit is also welcomed with great joy and excitement, but the trouble is, the four year old arrives with all the timidity of a typhoon and the packaged energy of a red bull factory. Keeping up with him is quite simply out of the question, the challenge is all about activity management and containment.

Previous attempts to try and tire him out have only resulted in the grandparental auld gits collapsing under the pressure of keeping up. If he decides to take off, legs a-blur, nothing can catch him. His acceleration from rest to top speed could only be measured by the timing lights at Santa Pod – a digital stop watch is of little use if the arthritic thumb isn’t fast enough to click the buttons.

Pleas to the parents to allow the use of one of those extending dog leads have fallen on deaf ears. Apparently, such canine devices are frowned upon in the politically sensitive ‘woke’ humanoid world in which responsible adults find themselves these days. Besides the ratchet in such a tool would overheat if applied in this case.

The challenge is therefore to try and find something that will exercise and excite the brain as opposed to exercising his physical propensities.

Earlier in the week, we had visited the Swedish furniture shop to purchase a toy garage which looked ideal to entertain the wee chap for more than a few seconds, but they were out of stock. That led to a moment of divine inspiration – we’ll build one.

So Saturday morning was spent amidst a pile of cardboard, sticky backed plastic and a hot glue gun plus cutting implements. These latter two items requiring the most assiduous attention during the process otherwise aforementioned auld git would probably have found himself stapled to the wall and held in place with hot glue.

However, we did manage to cut up the pieces and stick them together without any blood being spilled and all five fingers on each hand still intact. What we ended up with was hardly a work of architectural significance but it was functional and did manage to soothe the miniature tornado for a couple of hours.

Later on that day he was returned home intact, without any missing parts or additional foreign objects glued to him and full of his constructional successes.

Job done, but does that qualify me for a Blue Peter badge?