A perfect adventure to set us up for the change

It was Liso’s idea.

“Let’s go for a drive!” she said.

It was one of those perfectly timed suggestions. The afternoon had just slipped over into early evening. The golden light was afoot, and there was about an hour before sunset. We’d pretty much had our fill of our phones and our tablets, so an outing was the ideal way to wrap up a Sunday.

As father and daughter, we’d been together for about a month, savouring every minute of our time together – something not to be taken for granted in a co-parenting situation.

This Sunday evening, there was already talk of the president making some kind of big announcement. Something to do with the virus. One could only speculate what it would mean, and how it would affect us.

I had already got Liso up to speed on the safety precautions we needed to take, and we were washing our hands like coal miners off on a dinner date. A seven-year-old is a brilliant hygiene consultant. You tell them once, and after that, they tell you every time!

“Have you washed your hands?”

Things would be changing, but I couldn’t quite work out how. The president’s speech would offer more. Perhaps schools would close. Businesses even? We might all be forced to work from home. Could they enforce that level of quarantine, I wondered?

It didn’t quite seem possible.

The evening was so glorious, it was impossible to believe there was any doom and gloom afoot. The clouds positively glowed in the orange-golden raiment of the sunset. We explored Waterfall by road, which neither of us had yet had a proper chance to do.

Tata and Liso, on another of the adventures we love so much, squeezing in a last-minute road trip to bid the weekend a fitting farewell. Waterfall has been a country area, hills and dales and river valleys, the fields impossibly green as new developments gradually lay claim to them.

The sun dipped deeper, and I made another loop around the neighbourhood, working in a turn towards Buccleuch to add some distance to the journey. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it felt like this was the end of something, the culmination of a phase, and things were about to change.

I told myself not to be so sentimental. An evening this perfect, with the child you love more than anything … What could be ominous about that?

But even as I thought that, I took a turn down a cul-de-sac I’d not explored before. Just to provide a last little bit of something novel, a final flourish to Tata and Liso’s little outing beneath the African sunset.

Then we headed back on Woodmead Drive towards home. We needed to get set for a bath and some reading, after which we would watch the big speech together. I would sit glued to the president’s every word, while Liso played on her iPad, not really grasping it.

But things would change, enormously.

And the sunset drive the two of us took that perfect evening at Waterfall, that would be the last adventure we would have together for a long, long time.

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