On listening

— to kith, and to ki and to kin

The day that we arrived in Scotland—over a fortnight ago now—my two year old son said two things to me that I have thought of almost every day since.

He’s at a really incredible stage with talking just now; he’s been speaking in seven word sentences recently and I have realised I was not at all prepared for how moving I would find all this.

Last night, before he went to sleep, he asked his first proper question . He raised both the intonation of his voice and his eyebrows at the same time — inflection and body language in perfect harmony —and honestly I was bowled over. He asked me