Mabel told me at the playground on Thursday that she had never climbed a particular steel ladder (seen above) and wanted to. This ladder leads to a square tower room, like a sentry box, with a peaked roof of corrugated metal. The whole set-up clearly was intended for children older than Mabel. All the same, she climbed the ladder with its wide-spaced rungs. I climbed after her and we stayed in the tower room (protected by dense mesh walls) until Mabel got bored (which did not take long). The journey backwards down the ladder seemed to me more than could reasonably by attempted by even such an agile two-year-old as Mabel is. Instead, I assumed a stance at the foot of the ladder, raised my arms, took a good grip of Mabel's middle, and flew her out of the tower in a long slow descending spiral until she reached the ground.
