Unearthing our hidden talents

Hidden talents. We all have them. We just need an opportunity for them to be revealed.

Hidden talents. We all have them. We just need an opportunity for them to be revealed.

In my experience, parenthood seems to have been a rich source of hitherto-undiscovered talents.

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Just the other day, another one emerged that left me feeling rather inordinately proud - you'll see why the pride was inordinate when you read what the 'talent' in question was and how I acquired it. But I digress.

We took Tibbons to one of the 'warm-up' activities for the annual Burning the Clocks procession in Brighton, which included making a paper-bag lantern (which we would later put a light-up squirrel inside - Take that, modern art!) and playing with lots of different forms of light.

The highlight though, was making shadow puppets on the wall.

As we approached the shadow puppetry, one of the women involved in the event was showing a girl how to make a rather convincing horse and then a dog.

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Naturally, I decided to join in by making a reindeer with my hands and getting it to bite the girl's horse. What can I say? I got a bit carried away.

Thankfully, the girl found this hilarious/slightly amusing - or we would have had a tale of Christmas woe on our hands - and soon asked me to show her how to make the reindeer herself.

In fact, shadow Rudolph was quite the hit and I felt oddly proud of my latent shadow-puppet skills.

As we moved away, four shadow Rudolphs gracing the wall, Daddy-O asked me where on earth I'd learned to make a reindeer out of my hands anyway. I confessed, my pride a little dampened, that this knowledge had been gleaned during a particularly unproductive afternoon watching CBeebies.

Here's to you. Cat. You always were my favourite.

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