Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men

As the artist sleeps the night after the birthday party, the artist's son has a dream. He travels through these long broad tunnels of cauliflowers into a large and open lake where birds with little birthday notes in their beaks dive from left to right and right to left again. Fish of all colours leap from the water and soar through these multi-coloured rings held by fantastic stand-up cherubs in the clouds. He makes it through entirely and lands on a giant leaf, getting caught in the current. Then he travels faster and faster, towards a giant waterfall, and after a while goes sailing over the edge, gliding like a leaf himself, cutting through the air like a paper dart, and by the time he lands at the bottom, he is lying on his back with a broad five-year-old grin on his face and with his little presents beside him, waving at the friendly gorillas in the trees, nodding at the odd hippo's head emerging from the water, and belly-laughing with the pikes. There is no doubting it: he is happy in this dream, and he bears none of the anxiety befalling some of the crabs at the bottom of the lake. He looks up with an air of bliss as he continues through the water and spots high above himself a flying pig. He so wants to be up there himself - he likes pigs - that he wills himself into the air like a magnificent boy in a flying machine and starts - as if by magic - flying higher and higher. As he looks down he can just about see everything - the wooden huts being built at a rate of 3 million a second, the factories churning out custard pies, the armies gathering in the distance with their feet stuck in concrete. My, he shakes his head and goes even higher. He feels the warmth of the sun and suddenly remembers the chocolate car in his pocket. Better eat it before it melts, he thinks. And so he does. 'I like birthdays,' he whispers, to the make-believe earth below. 'I really do.' This last phrase wakes up the artist, but not yet the artist's son.

We're all working on a summer holiday

I had wished to make a relaxed trawl of an interview with the artist about the implications of being a mother working at home while the children have their school summer holidays. Well, what better answer than the fact the artist is now too busy working? I don’t know how she does it … well, I do actually. It’s called industriousness. An absence of sloth. Activity. I don’t mean to suck romance from the bite too much but there is not a lot of laughter from the grafter right now - not when there's work to do. Nor is this mania or obsession. It is mission. The children, meanwhile, having just come back with us from an Olympian tour of the park, watch their grandfather’s work instead, a primary coloured sunlit DVD about a previous summer holiday, the two children’s birthdays to be precise, while the artist returns to her well measured working of the paper on board screwed to the living room wall behind me, creating in the process a kind of figurement of sense, while all around the little bones grow and the little brains yield more and more. Another thing: we walk just about everywhere - we don’t have a car - so physical exercise and therefore physical fatigue in this house is commonplace. A good thing, mind, even if it does double the effort required for the artist to continue working. Actually you can tell children who spend too much time in cars and not enough time walking or cycling. They look stiff, their hips in particular, and they do not like anything agile. Or is it our state schools and their lack of large grassy playing areas because they have sold the land to the private schools next door? (Where you can't play anyway in case you fall and break a bone and the parents sue.) Who knows what some of the little people will be like as adults. Mobility and disability frames by their forties? The artist's father has a rapt audience with his film. Maybe that's how you deal with them when their mother is an artist and father writing this down: you have a grandfather who makes films you can watch over and over. (They smile at their on-screen grandmother.) Bed, children. It’s getting late. (Dad.) You should be in bed by now. (Oh yeah.)