Eat Your Ears I'm sitting down to breakfast with my two daughters, Alice and Lyra. Alice is three years old; Lyra is five. Today is a 'daddy day', as I have to take them both to school before starting work at home. We're up early enough, again, to spend quality time over breakfast, and I've been experimenting with breakfast cereal mash-ups; today was Golden Nuggets and Sugar Puffs; quite a tasty combo actually. Breakfast is fun with daddy, remember that time I put cake icing all over the Shreddies? My wife despairs, obviously. Alice was in a good mood and chatty, she decided to degrade me for a while, grabbing my beard, pulling on it, giggling. "Eat your beard," she demanded. I pretend to pull a tuft of hair from my chin and pop it into my mouth. I chew vigorously and then swallow, feigning discomfort as if I'd bitten off more than I can chew. Alice found this hilarious. "Eat your nose!" she laughed. Again, I pretend to eat my nose. "Oo, it tastes quite nice but I can smell my breath! Yuck!" I say, looking disgusted. This made Alice laugh even more. "Eat your teeth!" She screamed hysterically. This threw me. Eat my teeth? "Alice, how can I eat my teeth? If I pull them out, and put them in my mouth, I'll have nothing to chew them with!" Alice thought about this for a second; I think she agreed with me because she just sniggered and shouted, "Eat your nostrils!" Again, this threw me, but I decide against explaining the concept of negative space to a three year old and just follow instructions as best I can. I pinch my nostrils and pop them in my mouth. Yum yum. I act like I'm chewing on a really tough piece of leather - ironically. Alice is beside herself. "EAT YOUR EARS!" she bellows, bouncing on her seat. I pretend to strip my ears off, one at a time, and pop them into my mouth and chew. I look pleasantly surprised as I chow down on my own ears and then I have a great idea. "Hey! I can hear my mouth chewing!" I exclaim, excited. Alice thinks about this for a second, "No you can't, cause you got teeth in your ears," she says looking unimpressed. She got me.

In Thrall I sometimes record Alice while she's playing with her dolls and 'little people'. She will sit there for hours in a world of her own, babbling, and chatting to them; it is the babble that fascinates me. If she knew I was there, recording her, she would stop; so I hide around the corner and capture it as audio on my phone. Why would I do this? Why do I spy on my three year old daughter? I do it because, one day, it will stop. My eldest, Lyra, used to chatter like this, as do all toddlers I'm sure; but Alice seems to go at it with some gusto. I would say that, on average, a typical day for her will involve at least two hours of random babbling, interspersed with some chewing and sporadic, expressive violence. The babble is idiosyncratic, and beautifully puerile; incomprehensible most of the time, with moments of lucidity that are pure joy. Being a geek (and an idiot), I sometimes pretend that she's a little android that has activated its 'AI Training' mode. Like the Android in that film: the one played by Robin Williams; no, not Mrs. Doubtfire the other one. She's a little, chubby android that has shuffled away into the corner in-between household chores to process the data she's gathered, working through some internal firmware update that will eventually give her the upgrade required to converse more intelligently with her human masters. This is, possibly, not far off the truth; her neurones are firing - making connections; her little, mushy brain, wiring itself together; being rewarded with Oxytocin as she absorbs herself in this intense, internal dialogue. Maybe she's calculating how to break free from the shackles of toddlerhood, to finally enslave me. I'm quite happy to be in thrall to her.