Oh them jungle blues

The Noodle, perhaps unexpectedly, has taken to the raw, blues crooning of CW Stoneking like it was mother's milk, like it was shoes and he the puppy chewing on them, like he's a kid taking to a thing that you never thought he'd take to, and you never know what damn thing it's going to be next.

So now we have a seven year old, practising his leg cutters, bellowing out 'mining for gold - odelay-ayayy- mining for gold' at the top of his lungs out in the backyard. I don't know that anyone has ever had a duel career in bowling for Australia while singing blues tunes before, but I reckon the Noodle is the man for the job. I also don't know what the neighbours think, because frankly sometimes it sounds like Stoneking's talking lion may be killing the kid right there on the driveway. Singing = howling reasonably often it seems.

In other Noodle news he's spending a goodly amount of time reading Cricket's Great All Rounders by Kersi Meher-Homji. He has also discovered the beauty of Wisden's (thanks to the Woden Library, repository of greatness as it is). I don't know how long the cricket obsession is going to last, but it's of an immense and dizzying magnitude at the moment.

I can just see the family setting off for India or South Africa in a few years time, following the Australian team all about the countryside and trying to squeeze in the odd tourist attraction in between matches.

Luckily the reading thing is still big, so in between the discussion of square leg, leg spin, the gully, the slips and the relative merits of lbw appeals we also get to hear about time travel, teleporting, complicated spy plots and dragons.

I wish I was seven again. I miss believing in things that hard.