On the Gender Divide.

Every year until recently when the crop diminished, I used to take the produce of my apple tree up to the school for the cook to use in making desserts. On one occasion, being grateful and knowing of my unconventional ways and my blogging habit, the headmistress invited me to stay and talk to the kids. She thought they might have questions and I could add something different to the usual stuff of which the syllabus was composed. I went and sat at a table with four or five little boys, and one of them asked me to tell them a story.

And so I told them of the time I was backpacking around India in my youth. I related the story of how I was sitting at the edge of a village in a rural area when a King Cobra approached and raised its head ready to strike.

‘Blimey,’ said one of the boys, ‘that must have been frightening. What did you do?’

‘I picked up my guitar and played Mr Tambourine Man.’

‘And what did the snake do?’ asked one of the boys.

‘Remained perfectly still until I’d finished and then slithered away again.’

A sallow-skinned girl of around seven or eight was sitting alone on the grass, colouring in a picture of a ceremonial elephant complete with howdah. Without averting her eyes, she asked quietly:

‘Was any of that true?’

‘Nope.’

In fact, none of this is true apart from the first sentence. The rest is just making a point.

'So what is the point?' you might ask. 'Whatever you want it to be,' I might reply. And I might just add that the sallow-skinned girl was probably called Dominique, and probably grew up to drive an SUV through the streets of Mumbai while expressing great depth of meaning in a handful of words.

The last paragraph was written many years after the rest. I miss Dominique.