Monthly Archives: June 2025

Part 2: That. Look.

Our first full day after we made it back to London was also my birthday—my fiftieth, in fact. The younger was therefore feeling especially magnanimous, and agreed to accompany me to the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, though she demurred at venturing into the water herself.

“I’ll just put my feet in,” she declared, to which I responded, “I don’t think you can! It’s in or out!”

I hadn’t been to the pond for a few years, and always find it slightly forbidding. The woman at the little ticket office at the entrance had a quizzical look on her face and I sensed we would have to prove ourselves in some way somehow to be permitted to enter, perhaps answering a riddle or performing some kind of feat.

“Hello, I would like to swim please!” I said.

She nodded.

“And she, I gesture to the younger, “doesn’t want to swim … can she just sit and watch?”

“Well, not when it’s crowded,” the woman said.

There was a pause as I considered whether this was a yes or a no.

It was about 9:30 on a grey weekday morning. I couldn’t really see into the pond and its environs past the ticket office, but it didn’t seem especially busy.

The woman sighed and reluctantly added, “I mean, at the moment, it’s fine.”

I now sighed with relief but the woman was not finished with us.

She narrowed her eyes and scrutinized the younger.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go in?”

The younger didn’t reply and I hastily jumped in.

“I tried to persuade her but she said she was sure she didn’t want to—and she didn’t bring her suit,” I added.

Throughout this exchange the woman was only making eye contact with the younger.

“Luckily for you,” she confided, in the quietly victorious tone in which one might say, “checkmate,” “we have loads of extra swimming costumes.”

I was still looking at the woman and not at the younger but I could imagine the latter’s expression, which was confirmed by the woman, who now howled with laughter and threw her head back.

“Oh my God, she just gave me That. Look,” she said to me, between guffaws.

I knew instantly what look she meant.

She continued, “That, ‘Mum. NO.’ look—my sixteen-year-old has perfected it.”

By now she had her phone out and was scrolling through pictures.

She showed us.

“See that’s me and my Mum, and we’re laughing and look at her!” she screeched.

She pointed to the third figure in the picture and then looked at me, shaking her head.

“She’s just looking off to the side!” she exclaimed, still incredulous.

I obliged her by looking but I really didn’t need to because I’d seen this picture a thousand times before, many of them on my own iPhone screen in the previous week: the happy family snap punctured by a teen’s withering kill-me-now side-eye, a move they seem reflexively to perfect in the preteen years, and which I find admirable and irritating in equal parts: admirable for its dogged refusal to perform bonhomie on cue, to render oneself Instagrammable. Irritating for how mercilessly it exposes my own readiness to perform and demand the facial expressions the algorithms associate with domestic felicity.

As reflexive as the younger’s side-eye was my own rote participation in the ticket-office woman’s good-natured complaining about her daughter.

Tipping my head at the younger, I confided, “Well she’s only 13 and she’s clearly already got it down! She’s precocious!”

I didn’t need to look in the younger’s direction to know that she had shriveled and expired from mortification during this exchange.

Even as the words tumbled out of my mouth I knew I would pay for this and, indeed, as we walked away the younger stared stonily ahead, muttering unspeakable things under her breath and shaking her head.

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De Mouilpied:

Part 1. Locke, Croc, and Paddle

On the last Saturday in June 2024 we began the odyssey back from Iona to London. The first leg of the journey, the ferry from Iona to Fionnphort on Mull, is also the shortest. This time, as we gingerly made our way off the ferry onto the jetty at Fionnphort, seawater splashed up periodically between the cracks of the metal ramp on which we made our descent. This to and fro of the waves adds a slight sense of ceremony to the act of disembarking. While the thick-soled or those especially eager to claim the best seats on the bus thrust ahead, gentler souls—you could say the more tentative, but I would say those with a keener sense of timing—pause, the water’s woosh their cue to descend as the waves retreat, like the “and” that cues you to come in on the first note of an eight-bar phrase in a dance class.

When the water splashes Mum’s feet she says to my brother, who is holding her hand, that it is only fitting since her middle name is De Mouilpied, named after a place in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, where her mother grew up. According to my mother’s eldest sister, in email correspondence from 2018, “Mother’s grandmother was Elise Leale née De Mouilpied this is Guernsey-French, this means “of marshy meadows” but our irreverent Dorey cousins said it meant ‘the wet feet’!!”

Except that it is De Mouilpied not Des Mouillespieds! The singular is striking: she, not of the wet feet but of the wet foot, as if she’d put one foot in and then thought better of it; or as if my grandmother had held her daughter aloft and then, in what might be called a reverse-Achilles, carefully lowered her into the water so as to dip her heel—and one heel only!—into the marshy Guernsey meadow.

The mood of the single wet foot is different from that of wet feet, a fact reflected in the tonal difference between dipping one’s toe in the water and getting one’s feet wet.1 The former is dainty, tentative, whereas the latter evokes a gameness and can-do attitude that elicits a preemptive fatigue in me. Paddling is more playful than getting one’s feet wet—and I prefer the Britishism’s associative link with dabbling and dappling, by contrast to the American “wading,” which sounds positively laborious.2 You wade through something, to get somewhere, whereas paddling is an activity in itself.

Whether singular or plural, the drenching of one’s nethermost regions is commonplace on Iona. You step jauntily onto an innocent-looking patch of grass only to find your foot sinking rapidly into bog. With any luck you recognize your misstep in time to spare your second foot from the same fate, but now you must trudge on unevenly, with one squelchy foot, which gradually becomes unpleasantly warm, swaddled in sodden sock.

Having water seep into your shoes—or, in an idiom preserved in the OED that I think should be revived—being “wetshod,” is not generally an experience one enters into on purpose. Although the only part I remember from Locke’s treatise on education is the recommendation that, when raising “a young gentleman,” one should “have his shoes made so, as to leak water.” Locke’s logic is that this innovation will enable the gentleman to reproduce the experience of the hardy poor, who go barefoot and, “by that means, come to be so reconciled by custom, to wet their feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands.”

To the long list of innovations we attribute to Locke, then, we should also add, Crocs, c. 1690. 3

Notes

  1. See OED: Additional sense (2021)1. 1901–to dip (also put, stick, etc.) one’s toe in (the water) and variants: to try something new cautiously or gradually; to experiment tentatively.
    P.7.f. 1924–to get one’s feet wet: to begin to participate in an activity; to gain initial experience. ↩︎
  2. See OED: wade, verb, 3c, 3.c. figurative. (Now chiefly, to go through a tedious task, a long or uninteresting book.) ↩︎
  3. When I tried to tell the younger about Locke’s idea while writing this post, she made it known that she was already well acquainted with his proposal, because I told her about it last time she found herself wetshod, which was, in fact, on Iona, when the duct tape holding her Chuck Taylors together finally gave out. ↩︎

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