‘Gloob!’ says my daughter. This is what she calls the globe that sits on a shelf in our sitting room. It’s one of my favourite among her neologisms, and one we’re unlikely to grow sick of hearing. This is primarily because ‘gloob’ is one of the best syllables to hear pronounced by a ginger two-year-old, but also because time spent with her gloob means many precious minutes of self-directed play, allowing us a break from the more full-on supervision she so typically prefers.
Nana and Grandad bought the gloob for our son’s fifth birthday. It’s around 60cm in diameter, battery operated and comes with a stylus attached. It’s mounted on a base with a small LCD screen, which displays facts and figures about anything you point the stylus toward. It offers wildly detailed information on population, demography and national customs. Each creature mentioned is delineated by class and notes are given on its diet and herding patterns.
Back then, I thought the sheer level of detail it offered was excessive for a globe aimed at small children, but I had clearly underestimated my son’s addiction to facts. Indeed, it proved such a hit that, within hours, I’d bought a downloadable extra that reeled off all the prehistoric creatures that once roamed on whatever spot you press. This add-on cost only £5, but required two hours of extremely detailed navigation of the company’s proprietary software delivery system, a process which left me feeling every bit as much a dinosaur as Arackar licanantay (sauropod herbivore), late of Chile’s Atacama desert.
My son uses it less and less these days so my daughter, though unimpressed by its more detailed bells and whistles, is now its biggest fan. She adores her gloob for its colour-coded maps and cheery voice. (With a vertiginous awareness of my current cultural knowledge, I immediately recognised its narrator as the guy who voiced Pingie, my son’s much-missed – and, it would turn out, fatally un-waterproof – toy penguin).
Her intentions with the gloob are perhaps erratic. She wields the stylus like a weapon, pecking at countries like a giant oviraptor trying to get at a purloined pterosaur egg. Her sense that it represents the planet she’s sitting on is limited, and she enjoys it more for the call-and-response of prodding its surfaces and getting an inscrutable blast of information from her little screen in reply.
Through some perverse instinct at education, I sit beside her, cross-legged, and try to show her Ireland and England on the map. She responds with offence at my attempt to enforce meaning on her play, glaring at me with the baffled indignation of someone having their own joke explained to them. I try to prompt the screen to play something I know she’ll enjoy, footage of sheep, cows or seals, perhaps, but she shrugs me off like I’m stealing her handbag.
She continues tapping away, gaining from it some meaning I cannot discern, so I withdraw to the sofa. She may not know much about geography, but she has mastered being territorial at least. She’s learning in her own way and all its mysteries are hers to discover. Laughing by herself at secret knowledge, she holds the whole world in her hands.
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Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
