The Dinosaur Armies

Every day my son and I go to war.

Not a real war. A dinosaur war.

He lines them up on the floor — two armies facing each other across the carpet. He has twenty. I have five. The mathematics of this arrangement are not in my favour and I have raised this with him on multiple occasions. He is four years old and remains unmoved.

His team includes every apex predator known to palaeontology. Mine appears to have been selected for their entertainment value rather than their military capability. I have never won. I suspect I never will.

We call the pterodactyls ‘flying-dactyls’. I know this isn’t the correct name. I think it sounds much better and I stand by it.
A few weeks ago on one of my morning walks I spotted something wedged in the branches of a tree. A small plastic triceratops — abandoned, weathered, clearly well loved by whoever had left it there. I picked it up knowing immediately that it had found its next owner.

When I gave it to my son he inspected it carefully, declared it fit for service, and assigned it to his army. Of course.

I used to play with dinosaurs when I was a kid. Forty years later I am on my hands and knees on the carpet, outnumbered four to one, losing to a four year old. I wouldn’t change a thing.

There is something travel does that is very similar to what a four year old does with a bag of plastic dinosaurs — it takes the world as it is and asks what if. What if you went somewhere completely different. What if you didn’t know what was around the next corner. What if the ordinary rules didn’t apply today.

My son already knows this. He just calls it flying-dactyls.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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