A report this week by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) pinpoints a worrying new phenomenon – the institutionalised infant, a whey-faced creature, stuck in school for 10 hours a day, the child of commuting parents possibly, wandering from playground to desk to after-school club without real purpose, nodding off through boredom and fatigue.
I remember Christina as an infant, that fretful tense-limbed creature.
The infant, she postulates, is a fundamentally active and social creature, reaching out to the world and expressing a desire for recognition.
Except that instead of the tragic death of a seemingly healthy infant, the colony leaves no clues behind: the bees, creatures of habit whose bedtime coincides with sundown, vanish overnight.
It's at this moment that the creature's tale is transformed from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of a slave.
I dove down to seize a tiny creature; as I tore it I became it, and opened my infant mouth to cry in terror.
He was a snub-nosed little creature, with clenched fists and wide eyes, a child who, a decade on, has kept his chubby-cheeked, infant looks.
Only avowed vegetarians are entitled to deplore well-prepared infant lamb for reasons of conscience, but their complaint, though perhaps exemplary, will not spare the life of a single creature at Easter.
Family photographs show the infant Maurice, or Murray as he was then known, as a plump, round-faced, slanting-eyed, droopy-lidded, arching-browed creature — looking, in other words, exactly like a baby in a Maurice Sendak illustration.
