I am one

My name is Sunday Walsh. Apropos of nothing, I just had my first birthday. The relevance of that, apparently, is that the angle subtended by the Earth-sun system through the plane of the ecliptic is the same as that angle when I was born.

I'm writing this because Daddy has no ideas. Writer’s block, they call it. I can't have writer’s block, because I can’t write. I know some vowel sounds though, and I'm acquiring consonants. I can roll my ‘r’s (Argentinian nanny). Daddy can't do that.

Daddy has been through some rough times, lately. Not as rough as his close friend Robert (who could also roll his ‘r’s). Robert died a couple of weeks ago. Then, a couple of days ago, ‘out of the blue’, Daddy got a French knighthood – Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres. He was pretty chuffed about that. ‘An acknowledgement that Mona has some global reach’, he muttered.

But (and this is the genesis of his writer’s block), how can he be happy and feel pride (it's a ‘deadly sin’, after all), when his friends have suffered? In fact, does he have the right to feel joy while there is suffering in the world? All philosophers and priests grapple with this, and I'm not the one to resolve it, since I spend all my time blissfully free of the burden of knowledge (my uncle put it this way: ‘my biggest problem what to eat, my biggest love my sister[s]’). Daddy seems to think he has insight into all this. But in the here and now, he doesn't know how to resolve his personal conflicts.

Pride can burn through all that is worthy. Stop giving Daddy prizes, or he might turn into a right royal prick. I need Daddy to be nice to me for a few more years.

But he still wants to be a member of the Order of the Elephant.