The Uncle from Abroad

I had a interesting thought while hiking on Valentia Island during my holiday to Ireland.

I encountered a group of four children, two boys, two girls, maybe ten years old on average. They thought I was one of the many Spanish tourists that seem to travel Ireland at the moment. So they shouted random, Spanish-sounding gibberish at me. I surprised them by knowing English and had them guess my nationality for fun. So, we started chatting. That's quite unusual in itself because I don't normally enjoy talking to small children but these kids were bright and curious. They had family in the area and were visiting for the Easter holidays. They started asking questions about me - the usual stuff kids that age want to know, like how old I was, whether I was married or had a girlfriend, how far away Germany was, what was this or that in German. One girl had even learnt German at school. It was quite interesting listening to them.
Only after some time, after some other tourists had passed I became conscious and began wondering: were they giving me strange looks? And then suddenly, when their aunt or mother came calling for them from the distance, I actually became uneasy. Why? I wasn't doing anything wrong, just having an innocent chat. But still it occurred to me that maybe people would jump to unpleasant conclusions. From that moment I actually wanted to get away or them to leave because I felt that in a minute if their mum came up here I would have to answer questions like: "what are you doing with my children?"
That now strikes me as quite unfortunate that an adult - a male adult at any rate - cannot have a simple chat with some children without having to worry what people think. They were being curious, they had maybe never consciously talked to a foreigner before. But these days you have all the weirdos and paedophiles around that either pretend to be children online or nice, harmless uncles in person. It's sad that I should almost feel guilty talking to these children when I was doing nothing wrong.
It's a strange kind of thinking or awareness that we have to suffer from these days.