Ernő Rubik's Fair

We made it to the fun fair. The grass was waterlogged, the wind cold, and hardly anyone was around. (Only the ghost train looked like it belonged.) I took our son and daughter to the fair in order for the artist to work. (Almost literally, on the rockface: she is still finishing a piece with the dramatic remains of a hard-earned slate mine.) Anyway, we leaned into the aforementioned winds and I was the father in the middle. We were holding hands. We were like sailors on a blasted deck negotiating our very own Roaring Forties. After a while, our hands parted and the children ran ahead of me. I filmed them on the phone, careful to adjudge how best to fill the frame while trying not to think about my imminent return to the war zone. But what I was really also doing was feeling these golden moments. It was eerie a few moments later within the so-called walls of the makeshift fair, or money-hungry lair. It was like entering an encampment of dubious loyalty some two hundred years ago. Unfamiliar faces looked up from steaming drinks. A seagull picked at some soggy chips. We passed some spinning vessels, loud blasts of music, dodgy constructions. 'You should never go on a spinning cup,' said our daughter, pointing to a kind of hostile version of Alice in Wonderland. As the wind hit my face again, I thought about the city I am in and the extremes people go to find themselves. Creativity no longer feels like a serene act and most trends these days are based on the idea of short attention spans. Wildness I have never had a problem with, but a lack of manners? Our culture has mislaid them. It is puzzling. Anyway, when we returned the artist looked just as refreshed as we had been made to look by the wind. Her work, to paraphrase Dylan, glowed like burning coal. ("Pourin' off of ev'ry page like it was written in my soul ...") Furthermore, the children had both won something and had had a choice of what to take as their prize. A blow-up cartoon character? A target? A cuddly toy? All manner of choices. So what did they choose? Two Rubik's Cubes. Well, 300,000,000 have sold worldwide, before I get too proud.