Knickers

Today is the day of Emily's birthday party. It's a little late, I know, considering her actual birthday was more than a week ago. We would've held it last weekend, but Monday was a bank holiday so we figured half her friends would be away.

Anyway, today is party day and we've booked a few tables at a local taverna. It's in a park area with a children's playground, so all the kids will be able to run around and play and all the parents will be able to sit and drink coffee. Should be good.

Emily has invited a dozen of her classmates (plus brothers and sisters), we'll be rounding up the usual suspects (Lazarus & Eleni, Maria K, and so on), and as a special treat for Phoebe I've invited her two best friends from school, Angelos and Nikos.

To my surprise, however, she was far from pleased when I first told her. She started screaming and yelling that they're not her best friends but her worst enemies, that she didn't want them to come to the party and that they weren't allowed to come to the party. I tried to explain that I'd already invited them and that not two hours earlier she'd been playing in the park with them, but this made her cry so much that I couldn't even understand what she was trying to say.

It was more than an hour before she'd calmed down enough to tell me what the problem was. Not realising the party was taking place in a park and thinking that everyone would be coming here, she was afraid that Angelos and Nikos would open the top drawer in her bedroom, find her Disney princess knickers and make fun of her!

Of course, I explained to her that no one would becoming to our house this afternoon and that there will be no knickers on display in the park, Disney or otherwise*, so she has nothing to fear. Problem solved.

But apart from that, I can only marvel at her remarkable degree of insight into the male psyche. Because they would have, wouldn't they? Angelos and Nikos, if they'd opened her drawer. They'd have found her knickers and they'd have laughed. No two ways about it. That's just what boys are like.

And actually, I feel strangely happy that she seems to have got boys sussed at such a young age. Because let's face it, laughing at girls' knickers is about as complex and sophisticated as most males get until the age of, oh, about 25 or 30...



* In making this assurance I may be underestimating the propensity of many guests of the parental persuasion to squeeze themselves into inappropriately low-cut jeans. I do not exclude myself or my lovely wife from this observation.