Paddington Perambulation

Across the road I watch a man in his late-thirties walking along, holding the hand of his daughter. She is around two-years-old and she has a look of grave concentration on her face as she negotiates the recently-acquired knowledge of placing one foot in front of the other to move herself forward. They walk with painstaking slowness. Neither of them speaks. It is Sunday and the road is almost devoid of traffic. They finally make it, step by slow, tottering step, all the way across the street, and draw near to where I sit enjoying a thick, strong, turkish coffee outside the Rose Cafe. As they pass by, I look from the daughter's plump, cherubic face up to her father's long, lugubrious face. Half-stooped, in order to reach his daughter's small hand, he is also concentrating on the task of walking. He seems to be gritting his teeth; his eyes are half-closed. I look at his close-cropped hair, which reveals a long, wide, pink scar that travels up from behind his right ear over the top of his skull; another scar runs up the middle of the back of his head, to join the first in a T-intersection. He has clearly been permanently incapacitated by whatever trauma had been visited upon him.

As I watch the pair of them inch their way around the corner and out of sight I suddenly wonder who had been guiding whom across that empty Paddington street?