Swimming by moonlight

In the height of summer, when the water is still warm, Thomas, 11, and I swim at night. We both get into our baggies and leave our towels on the grass, tip-toeing to the water's edge.

The dogs nuzzle our calves in good-natured expectation and curiosity. We can feel the nudge of the wind on our back, the flicker and rustle as it threads through the leaves. Night swimming, we both agree, is what we were put on God's earth for.

Swimming at night provides us with a host of possibilities. We can plunge underwater pretending we are seals, or simply splash about like whales, gazing up at a moon looking suspiciously like one of those mini cocktail onions I remember from my mom's dinner parties when I was growing up. We can race and we can tumble. We can hold our breath and do handstands. We can paddle backwards or walk along the bottom to the deep end on our knees until we are virtually drowning (I have certain innate advantages here).

Our pool is fringed by a walnut tree on the one side, and a dignified, exceptionally tall palm on the other. It is a little old-fashioned in that it is a black-bottomed pool, not a modern, sparkly blue one you see in the television adverts for Creepy Crawlies. Ours has a fringe of blue and turquoise mosaics and all of this makes it feel a little quaint, as though we are swimming in another time or place or even country. We love this part of night swimming, the otherness and soft quiet of it all, the feel of water on our skins.

We might be in the countryside or somewhere fabulously exotic, like South America. We linger until we get cold and then traipse off, shivering, in search of warmth and hot chocolate, the dogs long ago having lost interest.

The problem with night swimming for Thomas and I is that he likes making noise in the pool, while I like silence. He splashes about and talks nonsense and tells bad jokes, while beyond a certain degree of splashing about, I creep towards the side of the pool to gaze at the moon. A night or two ago it was trapped between two palm branches. I admired it and pointed it out, but my comments were lost in the one-man mayhem.

To calm things down, I suggest we play a game.

"Let's be silent for a minute," I say, and we find a spot for him to sit on my lap. I cradle him in my arms as we sit in the water. My mind wanders but I sense that he's straining, keen to talk or splash off.

Still, he keeps quiet, bless him, and he honours the moment of silence. I know that it is stressful for him, determined extrovert that he is, but he plays the game with good grace and a little boy's gumption.

Across the grass from the pool are the sunflowers I wrote about in Sideways Dad before Christmas. These, you might remember, are mammoth Russian sunflowers bought in a little manila envelope at the Good Food and Wine show at the Dome a couple of months back.

They were small then, but they have grown to the point were they are almost comic, they are so large. They loom over our compost heap like streetlights now, some of them well over two metres tall.

I wasn't quite sure how to understand the use of the adjective "mammoth" on the packet when we bought them. But Thomas and I now understand that they weren't joking. Sunflowers are clearly no laughing matter for those Russians.