We are standing frozen with a box that is roughly the size of a small dining table held between us. The box is also roughly the size of a Winnie the Pooh aeroplane that makes taking off sounds and engine in trouble sounds (that’s the jingle actually) and lets you store your hairclips and teddies and mummy’s keys and money in it. We have been caught like thieves by Lula. She is standing between us and we are poised for the outburst because in moving the box we have inadvertently started it jingling.

Lula’s look of horror is replaced by an ear piercing scream, ‘Why are you putting my plane in a box?’

We stand there looking at each other waiting for the other to go first with the explanations. John just looks at me and says,

‘Why didn’t you take the batteries out?’

‘Because you need a screwdriver and that was like too much effort.’

He shakes his head at me whilst Lula attempts to launch herself on top of the box like a climate change protester onto the head of a riot policeman.

‘Sweetheart, darling, it’s just going on a little trip. To the garage.’

‘But I want my plane.’ there are tears by now, ‘why is it in a box?’

‘Because remember what we’re doing next year?’

She sobs, ‘We’re going travelling.’

‘That’s right. So the plane has to go into the box and then into the garage.’

‘But why?’

‘Because we’re renting the house.’

‘But why?’

I’m starting to wish the why questions were about babies and sex.

‘Because we need someone else to pay the bills and mortgage when we’re away.’

‘But why?’

‘So that we can afford to buy you hairclips and food and clothes – and stickers!’ I say inspired, thinking that is a winning argument.

She considers it for a moment, ‘But I want my plane!’ she yells.

By now the box is in the hallway and John dumps it there. Lula starts tugging frantically at the brown parcel tape trying to break into it to rescue her plane. She is wearing her ballet outfit at the time so it looks quite comical. I have to bodily remove her with promises that by the time we get back from ballet daddy will have taken the plane out of the box.

I shove her towards the car and hiss up the stairs to John to move the box into the garage before we get back. Out of sight, out of mind.

When we get back an hour later, we haven’t even swung into the drive and Lula is wondering out loud whether daddy has gotten her plane out of the box.

Damn, I think, well at least he’ll have moved the box so I can just say he can get it later. Later being a point in time that will forever be two minutes away.

We come into the hallway. Has he moved the box? What do you reckon?

I took Lula to see ‘Up‘ yesterday. It’s the new Pixar / Disney movie. It’s about an old man who spends his whole life dreaming of going to a place called Paradise Falls with his wife. Oooh, as I write that I realise it sounds like I took Lula to watch some porn. This was Disney – defintely no porn. Paradise Falls was a place not a feeling. Anyway, they dreamt about it but never did it because life got in the way (see where I’m going with this?). The wife died (lula spent the next two hours announcing at regular intervals ‘But mummy WHY did his mother die?’ – ‘It wasn’t his mother, it was his wife and she died because she got old shhhhh’ – ‘But WHY did his mother die?’). The old guy decided that he would fulfil their lifelong dream and go. Only, when he got there, after attaching some balloons to his house, meeting a talking dog and rescuing an emu like bird called Kevin from the clutches of a bad man who looked like John Lithgow, he found the scrap book his wife had made when they were kids and had dreamt of visiting Paradise Falls. She’d filled it with other pictures of their life together. You see, she’d been happy with the life they’d had.

I felt like sicking up my popcorn. Was Disney telling me that sometimes we spend our lives dreaming of another place and actually we forget to have the adventure that is sitting on our doorstep? But then that can’t be right, because this is the same people who market the Magic Kingdom at us. If that was the message, we’d all stay home and make do with cbeebies and not go see Mickey in Florida. I didn’t expect to be so philosophically challenged by a U rated film. John is impressed with my analysis I can tell, but after Lula’s garbled interpretation of the film, ‘there was a balloon and a man and his mother died.’ I don’t think he wishes he came with us.

At the end of the film, the old guy lets go of his house, which he’s clung onto, quite literally, the whole way through. He realises that it’s all about people at the end of the day. He nicks the airship belonging to John Lithgow (called the spirit of adventure) and that becomes his travelling home and he starts hanging out with a boyscout (hmmmm). So there’s a contradiction. Possibly, the sufi-like wisdom of the people at Pixar is translatable as ‘you’re never too old to have an adventure and that ultimately, home is where the heart is’. Which is to say, where the people you love are (in his case his dog and the boy scout). We don’t have a dog. Just a cat (which reminds me anyone want a cat?). We do have people we love though. We don’t mind so much about leaving the house behind. It’s just things as John reminds me when I start gazing longingly at bits of furniture and my shoes. But people, leaving them behind, that’s going to be hard.