The Water Fountain

I remember long ago on a very, very hot summer’s day my other nine-year-old pals and me went along to a park in Glasgow. When we arrived, we were all very thirsty. We came upon a water fountain. The stand was a metal pole and the drinking part was a steel cup with a nozzle in the middle. You turned the handle at the side and a fountain of cool water shot into the air and you bent down and drank as much as you liked. After our drink we sat a little way off to enjoy the sunshine. At my feet I noticed a small iron cover which of course I opened. It revealed a brass tap and curious and inquisitive, I promptly turned it. Then we noticed that a father and his little boy were standing at the fountain but were unable to get the thing to work…Eureka! Our discovery was the tap to the fountain.

A little voice, which definitely had horns and a pitchfork, whispered a suggestion inside my head and we were off. The father was still struggling with the fountain’s handle and I turned my tap. The water tumbled upwards and the father beamed triumphantly at his son and bent down to drink. I twiddled my tap. Just as lips touched water, the streamed died away and disappeared. The father shot upright and did a good deal of cursing. He tried the handle again and.. magically.. the water was back. He bent down and it fled from him, like an honest answer from a politician. By now the man was doing some really serious swearing and we were bent double with uncontrollable laughter. Then a burst of genius suggested itself to me. I conjured the water back from its hiding place and the man bent down quickly to try to catch it before it fled. This time I reduced the flow slowly; tantalisingly, inch by inch and just as it was about to vanish into the nozzle I turned it on full and the father received a fabulously soaked head.

This was the best variation yet and after that we allowed the fountain to function normally and the dad and his boy got their drink. This was not because we were little angels after all; we just wanted him to go, so we could start with a whole new Dad as soon as one came along.

And I heard the other day that the BBC is planning to launch a Digital channel exclusively for children. You can’t blame the Beeb, they have decades of superb programmes to fill it with and they are in competition with lots of other channels specifically for kids. But I think we should blame ourselves, if we allow our children to spend all their childhood Remote in hand leaping from cartoon to cartoon and from cowboy to spaceship. Outside there’s an enormous real world with real honest to goodness fun that they can share with friends. Why not hide the remote control now and send them out to some decent nearby park to search for a sunny day and an iron cover, which hides a brass tap.