“Dad, can you do my mask for me?”

Jon handed me a bandage roll.

“Your mask?”

“Yes.  He has his face covered in bandages to hide his identity.”

“How are you going to see?”

He gave me a withering look.  How stupid was I?  “Only from here down,” he said, indicating the bridge of his nose.

I started to bandage his face.

“No, no.  You’ve left a gap for my mouth,” he complained, watching my deft medical skills in the mirror.

“You’ve got to be able to breath.  Besides, what if you want to drink something?”

“But if you leave a gap, I’ll just look stupid.”

I stepped back and looked at him.  He was dressed in black, a headband with a metal patch, sporting a cryptic logo, and he had some … ‘thing’ on his forearms.  He had cut up the urban camouflage trousers he had outgrown and badgered his mother to make sleeves from them that reached from just above his elbows to his wrists.  These were what his hero wore, though for what reason I had no idea, nor was I about to ask.

“Right.  We wouldn’t want you to look stupid.”

His mother beat a hasty retreat into the kitchen, unable to hold the laughter in.

“Well, okay, if that’s what you want.”

I turned a couple of circuits around his mouth.

“Mmmph phlmble mmmm,” he said, eruditely.

“What?”

He pulled the bandages down.  “Never mind, I’ll leave the bandages.”

We were all off to the manga exhibition at Excel in London.  Everyone would be dressed up as their favourite manga character, he assured us.  His favourite anime series was Naruto.  Be very careful, there are traps here for the unwary.  Manga is totally different from anime, though they often share characters and artists.  To my old, uninitiated eyes, manga is the equivalent of the Beano comic, and anime is the modern Flintstones cartoons.

But of course, if I venture this opinion to my youngest, he is incensed.  I must promise not to say anything to anyone today, for fear of heaping shame on him by association.

His friend, apart from a Naruto headband, was dressed normally.  Normal, you understand, for a teenager.  His sister’s concession to the proceedings was a Hello Kitty T-shirt and a Gameboy belt buckle.  At nineteen, I hoped she would know better.

“I’m still feeling a bit sniffly with this cold,” said his mother.  “You don’t mind taking them on your own, do you?” 

“Sniffly?  Cold?  What about the dose of man-flu I have been gamely struggling against all week?” I rage, but somehow it comes out as, “Of course not, Darling.  You take it easy and get better.”

We arrived at the Excel centre.  We went to a manga exhibition here months ago.  Then it was relatively quiet, but that was a Sunday.  Today the cavernous car park was full.  There must be thousands here.  There must be other exhibitions going on.  I dropped the kids off at the entrance and drove off.  A headlight had blown on the car sometime during the week, and this would be a good opportunity for me to fix it.  I told them I’d be back for them later.

It must have taken about an hour for me to find a store, change the bulb and get back.  Near the periphery of the car park I found a spare space, and made my way up to the large mall, off of which the exhibition halls stood.

A headband and bandage were small potatoes compared to what some of these kids were wearing.  Some people had gone overboard big time.  They’d probably spent weeks on their costumes.  Some were disturbing:  fourteen-year-old girls dressed in leather with yards of leg on display.  Some were beautiful:  a young girl dressed in what appeared to be a mini wedding dress, with angel wings on her back that almost looked real.  Some were frankly hilarious:  a twenty-year-old nerd with stick-thin arms dressed as a barbarian warrior.  And some (well, most) simply bizarre:  two girls dressed identically in black and purple, carrying concertinaed  air-conditioning tubing around their waist, walking in slow time around the mall, occasionally stopping in sync, dropping the metal tubing with a crash, calling ‘poop,poop!’, then solemnly picking them up again and continuing their march.

Was this how Alice felt in Wonderland?

I wandered the long, wide corridor, looking for something to distract me.  There were other exhibitions going on, and an odd mix they were.  A woman’s conference; a drum expo; a computer game expo.  And then there was an empty exhibition hall.  Well, empty of exhibits, anyway.  There was a solitary stall at the front of the hall.  From it ran a queue to the back of the hall and along the back wall.  Then it looped back on itself.  Then it snaked back to the front of the hall, round and back to the rear wall again, finally ending half way to the front.

With horror I realised what this was.  It was the queue for tickets to get into the manga exhibition.  I scanned the crowd, but couldn’t see them.  How long had it taken for them to get in?  More to the point, how long was I going to have to kick my heels out here?

I found a coffee stall with a spare table.  Fortified with an Earl Grey I opened up the laptop.  What?  You want to read this, don’t you?  Besides, there was an embarrassed-looking mum with her laptop a couple of tables over, and she was working on a spreadsheet.

At lunchtime, as if by magic, they appeared.  Appropriately enough there was a noodle bar in the mall which catered for the vagaries of the combination of vegans, vegetarians and animal murderers that made up our party.  Jon’s friend had bought a ninja knife. 

“Really?  I bet your mum is going to be so pleased.”

“It’s okay, it’s plastic.”

Grace had bought a T-shirt in celebration of her job interview with Wagamama’s Japanese restaurant.  It said ‘Mi so happy’, with a picture of a happy bowl of soup.  She explained the joke to me.  I understood it less after the explanation.  I’m sure if I wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Meat is Dinner’ she wouldn’t find it funny either.

I’m looking forward to the day the kids sacrifice a day of their own and take me to something I want to see.  I wonder when the next mud-wrestling extravaganza is?