About a Boy, aged eleven

He has bright, brown eyes like his winter-bird namesake.

He has glossy dark hair and long eyelashes that his big sister says are wasted on a boy. They curve down casting shadows onto his still-soft, still-plump cheek when he goes to sleep.

He is open-hearted and endlessly affectionate, kindness knitted into every pore. He wants to hold hands. He wants us to sit together in an armchair that once comfortably held the little-boy version of him with me with room to spare, even if we must now sit in it uncomfortably wedged together. If he comes to stand next to me whilst I am sitting elsewhere, he wraps one arm around my neck, immobilises me in a loving headlock and ruffles my hair with his free hand.

He adores his big sister. She looks after him and he loves her for it. They giggle and plot. His vitality withers away a little when she is not near.

His mouth is often wide with laugher and often turned down in grumpiness. His laugh, when it comes, is explosive and contagious. His joy is whole-hearted, his misery is complete: his emotions are always writ large across his face. He is transparent. He cannot dissemble.

His hands fiddle and meddle. They twist things, they turn things. They flip bottles. They absent-mindedly pull things to pieces. They worry tissues and sweet wrappers, deep inside pockets, ready to shred all over tumbling, wet washing.

Sleep will only come over him if there is a bright overhead light shining into his face to ward off his night-time fears, and if the wardrobe door is open so he can be sure there is no-one and nothing hiding within, but he sleeps a little longer, a little later now, as his body stretches and lengthens and adolescence nods to him from the future.

He is a boy in love with the idea of having a dog; a boy perpetually disappointed by the knowledge that he will not be getting a dog and who plans for the dogs he will have when he is grown and living in the sunshine. He is a boy who says he would like to be a dog. He is a boy who spends time thinking about what kind of dog his family and friends would be if they were a dog (he used to think I was a Jack Russell, but now I’m definitely a Labrador he says).

Happy birthday to my beautiful Springer Spaniel.