I am sitting on the floor of my living room, immobile and surrounded by objects, all on important underwater business. I, too, am in the deep sea, and must remain there until further instruction is forthcoming. Having discarded it as a younger child, my four-year-old son has come back to Octonauts with gusto. If you’re not a fan already, it’s an Irish-produced extravaganza of toyetic edutainment, in which a fleet of cutesily drafted anthropomorphic animals rescue and research marine creatures.
As a result of said TV programme, my son knows everything there is to know about lampreys and the Mariana Trench, and asks solemn, probing questions about the yeti crab and hydrothermal vents. When we had friends round last week, questions about these seabed fissures became his standard conversational opener, leading to puzzled glances from adults who had no idea what a ‘hydo-fermal vent’ was. At night my son pulls me close and sleepily intones that siphonophores are not single animals at all, but several organisms operating in unison.
We only have two toys from his previous stint within the fandom. These have done little to sate his appetite. Instead, he has co-opted all his other toys, and an increasing number of tertiary objects, into a complex web of off-brand Octo-merchandise. Paw Patrol vehicles, plastic egg cartons, Rubik’s cubes, all drafted into a convoluted flotilla of auxiliary Octonaut flotsam, engaged in missions of such abstrusity that their rules are impossible for anyone else to follow.
Take that object on my knee, for example – or rather, don’t you dare. It must not be moved since it’s actually the Gup-I, a mobile ice research station that is currently stationed with me in Antarctica. It isn’t, of course. It’s the TV remote, and one I’d quite like to use, or at least move, some time soon. Such quibbles do not deter him.
Once an object is assigned a new identity, it is never forgotten. He circles his plethora of improvised proxies, conducting labyrinthine missions of baffling complexity. Ideas bounce around his head so fast you can see him struggling to get them out, trapped in their haste like the Three Stooges wedged in a doorframe. There is something euphoric, if exhausting, about watching him. He expends more mental and physical energy in play than I do in just about anything I’ve done for the past decade, parenting included. I reflect that I prefer to spend my own spare time thinking little and moving less.
Luckily, this suits him for now. Any movement from me would simply unbalance the hectic hierarchy of our new shared universe. As I learn when I reach from my perch in the Antarctic for the TV remote. He shoots me a glance from the South China sea. Chastened, I shrink back below the deep.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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