Prodigy

There was this boy on the train home last night. He was about four, and I could see he was looking at a fat book where each page had a grid with blobs on it. Having a young son who is interested in puzzles I watched him surreptitiously to see if I could work out what the game was. Luckily his Mother got talking with another passenger - clearly someone more musical than I - who had deduced these were chord patterns.

The boy had a way with music.

He said the train's horn was Low C and A flat, but that he liked horns that were E and A His favourite chord is A# major 7. I have no idea what that means. And yet for all that, he is a little boy. One who says, "Go, train, go" when we are stopped at a station and spontaneously cuddles his mother when she is talking to someone else.

After his book of chords, he pulled out a 4x4 sudoku and started filling it in.

Number One Son is never going to be good very good at music with my genes. However after watching a documentary on Singapore's water system, he has drawn a four page plan of a filtration system, complete with arrows showing direction of flow and different tanks for each process. It's not the sort of thing he can show off on a train, but I'm proud of him.