Accidental parenting genius

Yesterday, with a week left to go until the start of the new school year, I took LittleBear shopping for his new school shoes. This was, I admit, a rookie error. The last week before school, in a shoe shop, is somewhere between the First Circle of Hell (Limbo) and the Seventh (Violence). When we entered the shop, it was not actually possible to approach the shelves to even see the children's shoes through the seething mass of humanity and the precariously balanced towers of rejected shoes. Verily, I had chosen poorly.

Shoe shops are, blessedly, wise to the school-shoe-buying season, and not only have a numbered queuing system, but they also write down a description of the child* in question so that if, over the screaming hubbub inside the shop, a whimpering parent misses the call for number twelve thousand, seven hundred and ninety-two to approach the counter, they can still be found.

We were only ninth in the queue when we entered the shop, with an estimated twenty-five minutes to wait.

Twenty-five minutes with a bored and tired six year old who has already been dragged round a bed shop for his mother to try out mattresses. The omens were not good.

But then, oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh blessed gods and goddesses who have smiled upon me! I had a pack of playing cards in my handbag. And there was a spare corner of a bench for us to perch upon. So perch we did, and spent a surprisingly happy time playing cards while other mothers gazed on bearing expressions that were an extraordinary mixture of surprise, envy, hatred and desperation. I promised one of them who was already a further 8 places behind us in the queue that we'd choose our shoes as fast as possible. It was the least I could do. If the cards hadn't been LittleBear's very favourite, crested, Burnley Football Club cards, I might have donated them to the queue for The Greater Good. But even my compassion has its limits when it comes to my boy and his football team.

To compound my joy, the shop had shoes that fitted my son's (inherited) wide, spatula feet, and he liked the first pair he tried on.

From the jaws of catastrophe we snatched triumph. By accident.



* Mine was described as "Blue-spotted ribbontail ray", because unsurprisingly, he was the only child in the shop clutching a cuddly cartilaginous fish. Which probably makes the derangement that went into buying it worthwhile.