After the excitement of Christmas and New Year we were into the brief lull before the even bigger excitement of Three Kings Day on January the sixth. Children of all ages were still on the loose in town, unconstrained by the disciplines of school.
This was a young father caving in to the demands of his son, a dauntingly lively toddler of around three years old who was already fully capable of dominating any situation and winning any argument.
The toddler - let's call him Adán - had only recently been dragged away from trying to break every see-saw and wobbly pony in the small playground near the beach and had now, unfortunately, spotted the adult exercise machines close by.
These big, solid contraptions are not painted in bright nursery colours, they don't have smiley faces, they don't look like baby dinosaurs or fairy castles, yet they irresistibly attract children of all ages and particularly the tinies who are least able to do anything useful with them. There's a lesson here for designers of children's playgrounds: offer them totally unsuitable machinery in plain colours that they have no hope of operating and they will home in like bees to an orchid.
That didn't move at all for the featherweight toddler so he galloped over to the skiing machine. Even adults have difficulty with this one, which involves arm and leg coordination, and the diminutive Adán couldn't do much more than stamp his feet up and down on one of the pedals.
Over to the bicep exerciser, then, where you sit down, reach overhead to grab two handles then pull, cleverly raising yourself off the ground. Visitors love this, they take pictures of each other suspended in mid-air because it's actually quite easy but makes you look strong, healthy and having a fun time on holiday. Adán sat on the seat while father pulled the handles, raising and lowering him to squeals of delight then complaint: higher, faster!
'Time to go,' said his father, depositing him on the ground.
Adán ran back to the spine twister. Father ordered him to get off it. Adán jumped on to the skiing machine.
'Adán, we agreed, just one go on each. Come along now.'
The toddler had another try at getting the leg swinger to swing.
'Right,' said his dad. Pulling a mobile phone out of his pocket he tapped the screen a few times, put it to his ear and said 'Good morning, is that the office of the Three Kings? I'm afraid I have some bad news about the behaviour of Adán H-------. At the moment he's not behaving well at all.'
Adán ran over to grab his father's leg. 'No, don't tell them that!'
'In fact he's behaving very badly. I've asked him to get off some exercise machines and come home with me but...'
'No!' screamed the toddler, jumping up to try and grab the phone. 'Don't tell them that, papi! I'll come.'
Father looked down at him. 'You'll come right now Adán? Mmm. I think maybe he's decided to be good after all,' he told the phone. 'I'll report back to you later.'
In Spain the Three Kings, Los Reyes Magos, deliver presents overnight to children, but only if they've been well behaved. There are opposed opinions about whether parents should use them as a threat. Child psychologists think it's cheating and will breed mistrust when the kids find out what's going on. Parents of young children think it's brilliant because it works.
Watching Adán I think I'm on his dad's side in this case: a simple solution that avoided having to cart him off under one arm like a bag of potatoes, which would be undignified and very noisy. We saw Adán a couple of days later racing around on one of those dinky little strider bikes, so the Three Kings must have judged that he'd mended his ways in the nick of time.
