"I don't think... well, I don't think it matters does it?" I mumbled, trying to keep the peace. Apparently, he'd been slicing the carrots into discs and had just carried blithely on when he got to the parsnips. My Mum has a noble and ancient passion, it turns out, for lengthways-parsnips. The maelstrom didn't last long. And as my Dad pointed out, they were sure to taste 'just as good'.
I then spent the afternoon trying to convince my eleven-year-old nephew that Stonehenge is a prehistoric satellite dish. At first he raised an eyebrow and went back to playing Fortnite on his tablet, so I pushed the logic by explaining how the stones could pick up alien frequencies by aligning with the Earth's magnetic field.
"That's nice," he said, in that grown-up dismissive way that adults use, refusing to make eye-contact, "Good for you."
I laughed.
The sad, weird feeling isn't going away though. I don't quite understand it - I see things I see every day and I suddenly feel afraid and tearful. What is that? Perhaps three parts disappointment, two parts fear? But why? I wish I could pin it down. Later, as we sat down to a game of Qwirkle, I realised just how different we all are, and that made me sad too. Qwirkle's a strategy game - like scrabble with shapes and colours. The rules are very simple, but figuring out the best move, or spotting how to score lots of points can take some thought. And it turns out that nine-year-olds and eleven-year-olds today, struggle to stay either side of 'bored' and 'distracted'. One was angrily longing for his iPad and was fed up with the game; the other was bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box and not concentrating at all. Both could have won. Unfortunately, they just annoyed each other, and eventually, I won instead. I might need to rethink teaching them chess.
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I read an extract from a book today that said that the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs flew in so quickly that there may as well have not been any atmosphere to stop it. At twenty times the speed of a bullet, and around the size of Mount Everest, it fell thirty thousand feet in less than half a second. After impact it would still have jutted a mile out of the sea.
It's a wonder anything at all survived! Funny how huge change though, can happen in the tiniest amount of time. Not that I'm saying that's going to happen in 2019! I'm not expecting a cataclysm; I think the sadness is much more about the complexities of life, and realising just how short the time is - for all of us. I feel it keenly at the top of this year - caught in this weird, unexpected bubble I've somehow chosen. How do you make a life count? How do you go about making a difference in this self-absorbed old world? And how do you do all of that without making it about you? I feel like there's a lot of stuff to unlock this year.
I think in hindsight, the parsnips might have cooked faster in discs. They were certainly a bit crisper, and I quite like a firm (but not too firm) vegetable. Who knows, maybe my Dad's on to something. Perhaps he secretly did it on purpose, and calculated that the experiment would be worth the risk of the 'storm' that followed? Or perhaps he's learned the very thing I need to learn, right here at the beginning of this tumultuous-looking year - that sometimes you have to be brave to make a difference.
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