A trip to Halfords

That involved a lot of chatting

Between Christmas and January, my son and I drove to Halfords to pick up a new brake light. Remarkably, my son had been eager to come — normally he prefers not to go anywhere that doesn't suit him. When I asked why, he didn’t give much of an answer. I guessed it was because he’d seen me watching a YouTube video of a brake light being replaced, and he liked the idea of using a screwdriver to prise away a chunk of our car. Perhaps he was hoping he could help. Or worse: maybe he thought I needed a hand.

On the way to the shop, he directed our conversation. 

“It’s weird that Metal Mario is metal,” he said. 

We don’t have a computer games console at home, but he’d been playing Mario Kart with family over the Christmas period, and he’d begun to learn about the characters.

“It is weird,” I said. 

“He’s metal,” he said.

I nodded.

Then he looked ahead and said, “Dad, I feel like you’re going to crash.”

I was driving at 35mph on a 30mph road. This felt safe enough to me, but he was sitting in the front passenger seat, which is unusual for him. When I slowed down, I thanked him for speaking up.

“If you’re ever scared in the car,” I said, “please tell me.” 

“I did,” he said.

“I know you did,” I said. “But if it happens again...”

“I can tell you or mummy,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He considered this for so long that I assumed he was taking it in very deeply. Then I realised no, because suddenly he began to repeat the phrase “you or mummy” over and over and over again, around 15 times in all, so that before long it was impossible to make out the individual words — it became just sound. This made him laugh a lot. And because he was laughing, I started laughing, too, which he took as a cue to repeat the words another 15 or so times.

“Youormummy.”

“Youormummy.”

We slowed at a set of traffic lights, and when he noticed the car in front he stopped saying “youormummy” and suddenly shouted “Hybrid!” which is something we both like to do, a kind of game. Then he went back to talking about Metal Mario, and then about how I am always trying to “trick” him but am no longer able to now he is five, and then about his sister, who is learning to walk — the car was moving again now — and then about coffee, which I told him I didn’t think I could do without, especially on mornings like these.

Being in the car with my son is often an unusual experience. His conversation is a chaos of random and literal thinking; topics move skittishly from one to the next. When this is not very tiring, like a constant, whirring drone, or overwhelming, like a series of very loud cymbal crashes, it is thrilling. The way my son talks seems to me a lot like freedom. What would it be like, I think, to have no care for regular conversation? What if I turned up to work one day and let my thoughts fly? I asked him what he wanted to talk about next and he shook his head, meaning both I don’t know and, I suspect, I don’t care.

Whatever it was, it would just come to him.

I can be like this with a handful of people, though I have to know them very well. My son seems comfortable speaking like this to most people, though he is only fully at ease when speaking to his mother and me, and to his friends, who also don’t seem to care if what was said a moment ago has absolutely nothing to do with what is being said now.

“Dogs don’t have clothes,” my son announced once.

I remember thinking this was something I’d heard before – a meme?

Then he launched into a memory of one of my wife’s uncles accidentally stepping on the leg of a family labrador.

Outside Halfords, I pulled our car beneath a branded tent and an employee and I prised away a red chunk of glass. When the employee looked at the bulb he said it seemed new, and he went back inside to check if it was still working. My son was standing on the base of an orange traffic cone that was almost as tall as him, trying to push it over. I said that if he wasn’t careful he might fall, too, and he looked at me as if to say, exactly.

Sometimes, truly, I have no idea what is going to come next.

Later that day, different journey, my son said, “Dad, which would win, nature or ice?”

He’d been quiet for some time, and because there had been no conversation leading up to the question I had no idea of its parameters. What did he mean, nature or ice? Isn’t ice nature? An actual part of nature?

When he noticed I was stumped, he slid back into his chair and said, “Ice, probably.”

I thought, Ice… probably?

Then I thought, What on Earth.

“You mean, in a fight?” I said.

But he’d already moved on.

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