Collaboration

In David Byrne's wholly enjoyable How Music Works, he refers smilingly to an article in Pitchfork that held that he would collaborate with pretty much any musician, for a bag of Doritos. Not quite, says Byrne - he does, he insists, have some standards. But in the end he winds up acknowledging that working with others has always been important to him.

Cleo, meanwhile, doesn't even know what Doritos are yet. She does like cucumber wedges, and pita chips - but doesn't require either, when it comes to collaboration. In fact, she's pretty much willing to play with any peer who comes along - just as long as they're not heads taller than her, or too many years faster. Yesterday, when I arrived at her nursery to pick her up, she shot me a firm look, and announced that she wanted to stay, and to play. And what was so involving? She and three other little girls were dressing up, assembling mock bouquets, and preparing for a wedding. It turned out that there was only one spouse - Cleo, in this case - but the others busied themselves nevertheless with their own roles: one was a flower girl, and one was a mother to the flower girl, and so on.

And above, an image from Sunday, when she and Jasper turned sticks in a park into swords, and navigated their way through a complex impromptu narrative involving a knight and a princess. The two chopped, and shouted, and consulted one another, and gamboled. Finally, they sat down, weary, and asked if we had any snacks. We did: Jasper's dad, it turned out, had a pumpkin cupcake on hand. And so, all of a sudden, the two collaborators were happily chewing - not on Doritos, perhaps, but in a manner that only confirmed the value of working together.