Hanging out with the Attenbros

One day in June 2020, I had had enough of Peppa Pig. I found a penguin documentary and put it on for my children. I didn't know it was going to change my life. Much of the pandemic is now a blur but I can organise the epochs in different ways. One era begins the day my elder son's much delayed speech suddenly organised itself into its first word. Not quite clear but clearly enough, he said: wildebeest. Mama-papa took another month or so. He said giraffe after wildebeest.

- NISHA SUSAN

His younger brother likes to play "which animal?". Walking down the street, I asked this four-year-old, "Which animal lives in Africa, is named after a river and likes to lie on the river bank and sun itself?" Salt-water crocodile, he replied. I looked down at him. He was smirking at me, having anticipated my reaction. "No, it's Nile crocodile," he now yelled, bouncing up and down on the footpath. The animal trivia king was adding plot twists in his private reality show-because his mother, wracking her brains to come up with newer and newer questions about the wee beasties to satisfy his wee brain, was simply not fun enough.

Let's be real. Having watched most of their animal documentaries as many times as they have and listened to hundreds of super trashy and addictive YouTube shows about animals, I know a ton of animal trivia too. I can tell a jacana from a jerboa, an agouti from a coati, an armadillo from a pangolin-I still have an edge over the four-year-old and six-year-old. But just a tiny edge, to ensure that the tiny emperors will let me live another night in the 1001 animal trivia nights. So every couple of days, when I am walking down the street and need to ensure the boy whose hand I am clutching doesn't run out into traffic, I can pull a rabbit out of my hat. To be precise, I can pull a snowshoe hare.

I know a lot but I am not spending my waking hours mainlining animal facts. It's not my life's work. In the lowest point of our pandemic life, one of our children, age 4 at the time, insisted on watching, over and over again, not Disney's Elephant documentary (Meghan Markle's first après-royalty gig), but the documentary about the making of the Elephant documentary. It was not super dull but dull enough to be never watched again.