Professors of play
Cambridge are recruiting a professor of play. It’s no wonder it was all over the news this morning. What a title. It’s up there with librarian to the stars and master of disguises. I want it on my business card.
I read the Guardian coverage in a frenzy of excitement. It gets my hopes up. “Applicants do not need to already hold a professorship” says a professor at the faculty. Fantastic, I think. I tick that box. I do not already hold a professorship. I have played and watched my children play, and I have occasionally thought about what it means. I’m already planning the business card. It’s the sort of title that justifies an exotic font. It’s the sort of title that justifies skimming over the rest of the job spec.
My youngest is 21 months old and I am at home with her games. Most of the time she mimics. She plays out her daily routine and she copies her older sister. Sometimes mistakes creep in; her sister plays emergencies with police cars and fire engines; she drives tractors over my head. As all children seem to do, she puts her babies to sleep with the covers firmly over their faces (a curious evolutionary trip-up).
I understand these games: she’s playing out her experiences, like we do in dreams. I understand the rules that delimit them. When she is tired or bored she steps back a stage or two, she bangs things and hits things and pushes things. I understand this exercise as well: what is this, let’s see what it does, let’s whack it, let’s see if it breaks.
It’s different with my four-year-old. Her games have moved beyond adult reach, animated by some other force.
At first she is desperate for me to join in. I feign enthusiasm, because I want to be the adult that can still play, but I find the exercise boring and alienating. I put a brave face on it, I move the dinosaurs around; I make them fight each other; I make them roar.
“The dinosaurs are not doing that”.
I line them up and make them race, but they are not doing that either. She grows frustrated with me.
I am an adult through and through, so I give in and ask what we are playing. I immediately regret it.
“We’re just playing”.
I’m out. I retreat to the sofa, to my rightful status as an observer. I’ve watched her playing with her friends, listened behind half closed doors. They argue and they fight, both within the game and about where the game is going, but no child has to ask what the game is or how to play it.
The summer I forgot how to play was long, and hot, and I can remember the overwhelming smell of the flowers and the earth, of course I can. There were three of us, and our games fell apart together. Nothing happened any more. We tried imposing rules, but rules won’t animate a broken narrative. By the autumn we were playing board games, we had taken up chess.
That’s my pitch. I’m not really worried about why my children play. I’m worried about why I can’t do it anymore, why my four-year-old moves freely in a place which I can no longer enter. I want to know why something so intrinsic to childhood dies at the threshold of adulthood. We throw so much at recreating it, all those hobbies, team sports, political meetings and interpersonal dramas, but nothing comes close.
