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foreign ideas, and prehistorically believethat children ought to have some vague notion of what does and what doesn’t constitute normal, decent behaviour. If it’s me – and it does seem to be – then I apologize. But Jesus Christ almighty, that was surreally horrible. Just after I’d led the children into a sing-song – we’d just got to ‘Hey, Diddle Diddle’ – Euan, son of Marjorie, pulled down his blue corduroys, squatted, grunted and did a poo right by Book Corner. No one said anything. The poo stayed there for minutes, with us all staring at it, until his mother languidly said, ‘Just a little accident,’ picked the poo up in her bare hand and walked over to the bin. Not the lavatory, which is situated just around the corner: no, the kitchen bin. Euan then lay on the floor, his enormous boy’s legs up in the air, while his mother wiped ineffectually at his bottom with a tiny, Economy nappy wipe.
    Then, as we were making worm spaghetti out of red Play-Doh, Ichabod punched Mango right in the face. ‘Never mind. Icky has issues with anger,’ Mango’s mother said, in the manner of one attempting self-hypnosis, though I could see she was pretty pissed off. ‘Oh, he’s just tired,’ said Kate, Ichabod’s mother, at which, I am sorry to say, I sniggered out loud – me and this Ichabod are going to have a problem, I’m afraid – and earned myself another black look.
    Polly, which is to say the unfortunate boy Pollux, delighted everyone by leapfrogging over gender stereotypes and choosing to dress as a ballerina for the duration of the games; his mother told him he looked very pretty, darling, and I tried not to think about Dr Freud. Polly’s brother Castor didn’t speak once, despite being two and a half, and played obsessively with the same train engine for two hours, screaming like a wild animal whenever anybodyapproached him, so then I tried not to think of articles I’d read about autism.
    Rainbow, Perdita and China, all about four years old, seemed entirely preoccupied with showing each other their knickers; Perdita taught the other two that her mummy called her vagina her ‘pussy’. ‘Miaow, miaow, pussy,’ they chorused for half an hour: one step to the left, one to the right and UP with the skirt. ‘Miaow, miaow,
pussy
.’
    And sweet little Alexander, aged two and a half, sat quietly on the floor by a bewildered Honey and pretended to read her a book about bears.
    Louisa and I did go for a coffee, and what do you know? She’s a single parent too. Although I always feel a bit fraudulent when I include myself in this category, a single mother is what I am: a single mother living in a big house, with childcare whenever I need it, which I do see isn’t the same thing as being a single mother on income support on the seventeenth floor of a tower block, but still. Louisa’s husband traded her in ‘for a younger model’, she told me, which is pretty tragic considering that Louisa is thirty-four. She lives in a flat above the organic bakery on Regent’s Park Road and works part-time as a hat maker. Over coffee and hot raisin toast, we had the kind of shy, delighted conversation two lonely people have when they discover they like the same things. Anyway, Louisa and Alexander are going to come over and play next week, and she says we should go for walks to the park together. So there was a silver lining to my gigantic cloud: Happy Bunnies turned out all right in the end.
    ‘See you on Tuesday!’ Felicity had called out as we left. ‘Marjorie is going to teach the children yoga!’
    ‘Yoga?’ I’d asked Louisa.
    ‘That’s what she does – she’s a yoga teacher,’ she’d answered.
    ‘Why does she weigh twenty stone, then? I mean, she’s hardly toned and sinewy, is she?’
    ‘Maybe she’s twenty stone and
very bendy
,’ Louisa had replied, and we’d laughed all the way up the hill. Yes, things are definitely looking up.

3
    We go to Sainsbury’s after Honey’s afternoon nap,