My Little Classifier.

It's an hour before noon, when Bobby will wolf down his lunchtime cheese sandwich and some grapes. Just time for a little walk down the stream. So it's back pack on from a ground start, with no help, in one of those precarious manouevres that's one day going to go badly wrong and end up with Bobby on the ground, and out into the autumn sun. The stream springs from the limestone about half a mile away. The water is crystal clear and, to my mind, drinkable. I do drink it, in fact, though I fall just short of encouraging my children to, what with run-offs of fertiliser when it rains or the chance that some dog shit has found its way in further up. I love having this stream so close. Observing how it changes through the year. Paddling in the cold healing stuff. Watching Anna catch Miller's Thumbs and occasionally a tiny Brook Trout in the cheap nets I bought recently. Observing the growth of the weed, the changes in the stream bed, the sudden muddying after rain fall that clears within hours, and the rampant water cress. Seeking out larvae beneath the gravel. Dipping Bobby's feet in. Helping Grace back up on to the parapet of the bridge so that she can leap into my arms, and again, and again. How I love to share my fascination with all this with them, how I hope they'll be open to it and not turn away from my Daddy-in-teaching-mode tone that sometimes bores Anna. A pied wagtail - see its tail wagging up and down. A yellow wagtail. A heron. And what are those birds with long tails, a little flock chattering to each other as they skitter along the hedgerows by the stream? I just have to know so I shall follow them downstream, Bobby on my back, to get a better look. Later I'll google the description to see if I can find a name for them. Ah-ah, says Bobby, pointing and I see that he wants blackberries. This is our new ritual. I pick them and pass them over my shoulder to his waiting fingers. He scoffs them as fast as I can supply them. Black - Berries, I say slowly. Black. Berries. And amazingly, he echoes my sound as best he can - Ack Erries, he goes, though not as precisely as that. I thrill to his parroting instinct. That's three syllables, impressive for 15 months, but I would say that wouldn't I. Better still, as we move away from the black berries, he stops saying Ack Erries, which means he's linked the sounds with these shiny black buttons that pepper the hedgerows round here at this time of year. He is naming, so I return to pick more, so I can be thrilled at his achievement once more. Black Berries, I go, instinctively cementing the tag. Ack Erries, he goes. And so we go on calling to each other, but quite who is copying who now I'm not sure. Call, response. Name, echo. The mirroring of behaviour, but who, Mr Neurologist, is mirroring who? One, two, three, I chant ritually as we saunter home. Now counting has no meaning for him yet, it's just mimicking sounds as far as he's concerned. Later the idea of quantity will come. In the meantime I am reminded forcibly of my father-in-law's aphasia, and the effort he puts in to ponderously repeated one-two-threes in a tone that's unnervingly similar to the one I'm using with Bobby. And he replies, slowly, one-two-three, sounding just like his Grandpa. The difference being, one is an act of budding neural integration while the other is a heroic struggle to restore the stroke-ravaged neural pathways of his speech centre. Opposite ends of life.