There is a scene in Jurassic Park (the first and in my
opinion the best by far) where the hero and a boy race down a huge tree
followed by a jeep which threatens to crush them as it fails, slowly breaking
branches behind them. It always struck
me as unfair that in a movie where dinosaurs (already pretty unlikely) have
been trying to kill you that even the inanimate object (the jeep) should also
endeavour to end your life. However,
the scene serves to get pulses racing as they scamper down the tree chased by
the rogue jeep. They succeed in
reaching the ground only to find themselves back in the open topped jeep as it
falls over them. There is a humorous
line where the boy points out that they are back in the vehicle again, exactly
where they started.
I too, found myself with feelings of deja view as I perched
on the front seat of the school mini bus heading home. It struck me as ironic that after half a
century I was back on a school bus surrounded by kids aged 3-17 again. Not that I enjoyed it the first time. It’s not one of those life events that are
so good you wish to repeat it. If some
one had told me I’d be back where I started in a school bus I’d have laughed in
disbelief. But, one of the joys of
school buses when you are older is that instead of obsessing about the spot on your
nose, a lad you fancy on the back seat or fearing the bully near the door, at
fifty plus you can enjoy the objective analysis of what actually happens on
school buses. Today, two small twin
girls are talking animatedly together.
The school always separates twins into different classes. It is either to allow them to develop independently
or to confuse teachers like me who find identical twins impossible to tell
apart or name. These two have obviously
missed each other and spend the bus ride home foreheads almost touching as they
lisp the day’s events at school to each other.
A bigger boy beside them asks.
“Which of you is the older twin?”
This prompts much lisping between the girls as they lean
even closer to each other whispering together and then one responds
emphatically,
“We are both the same age!”
The older boy snorts in annoyance and in a worldly ‘know it
all’ tone snaps
“One of you had to come out first. You couldn’t be born side by side coming out of your mother!”
The two twins confer again and I am concerned where this
conversation could end up. I fear a lot
of education/miss-education takes place on school buses. My youngest son was told in authoritative
tones that all of humanity came from a vending machine operated by a space travelling
monkey (it was a complicated but strangely plausible story) by a fellow bus
traveller from school. All our and his teachers’
attempts to replace this fiction met with failure for months. This tale of space travelling monkeys had
its own appeal to my four-yearold son and he was reluctant to part with
it. So, I listen in to this
conversation ready to intervene if this becomes explicit or more graphic for
these five-year-old twins. However,
they are more than up for this conversational gambit and respond unexpectedly with
“We were born by circumcision, at the same time”
