Roger Poopy has learned to spell.
No longer can we tell one another of our intent to take the dee oh gees for a double yew ay ell kay. Roger Poopy has got that one stitched up. He came dashing out of his basket this afternoon and was careering excitedly around the living room before Mark, who is terribly dyslexic, had finished working it out himself.
I shall add ‘spelling’ to the already long list of tiresome things that he does.
Another very tiresome one is ‘be chronically insecure’. This is probably because we are always telling him that he was the Clearance Poopy whom nobody wanted. He is terribly worried about being left out. If we want to drive him into a frenzy of worry, even whilst he is on somebody’s knee being stroked, all we need to do is make a fuss of his father.
He becomes haunted with the fear that somebody else might be getting a better cuddle than he is. His eyes swivel round and he bounces up and down in agony of indecision, as he wonders whether or not he ought to abandon his own cuddle to check out the other one, just in case it is somehow a nicer one.
This always makes us laugh, which does not help.
He has become more insecure than usual today, because we are right in the middle of the Home Improvement project. This is making him horribly worried, because the world is becoming unpredictably different. The result of this is that he is milling round anxiously underfoot, and people keep standing on him, and tripping over, and then shouting.
Mark has stuck the plasterboard to the dining side of the wall and run the electrical wires through the middle of it.
Whilst he was banging about and occasionally falling over the dog and swearing, I made a curry for dinner. It is sprout flavour, because we are on a tight budget and sprouts were what we had got. There is lots of it. It will probably last all week.
I have eaten mine by now, because I am on the taxi rank. I can understand why Sprout Curry has never become one of Jamie Oliver’s magnificent gourmet dishes, and I am not exactly looking forward to the aroma of sharing a bed with Mark later, but all the same it was not nearly as bad as you might have thought.
January is always a bit of a low-budget time, because nobody comes here on holiday in the depths of winter. The people who do are here because they have managed to get a special cheap offer from a desperate hotel, and are equally on a low budget. This means that they are unlikely to be lavish in taxis.
The low budget this time is not only because of January, but because of the Home Improvements.
This is more than worth living on Sprout Curry, because it has become so exciting now.
The living room has now been divided into two. We decided today that when we are old we are going to turn the new cupboard into a bathroom and just live downstairs. We liked this when we had the bed in the living room last summer. Instead of having a pension we will just rent out the upstairs bit of the house and live in the garden and the conservatory and the cellar.
We will be able to do this quite happily once we do not have a mortgage and school fees.
If we are really old and crumbly we will have to get one of the children to install the bathroom for us. Number One Son-In-Law seems the most likely candidate, I am sure he will be happy to volunteer, especially if the alternative is us coming to live with them.
In the meantime we have still got children at home and all of the attendant clutter, so for now it will be a cupboard.
It is all becoming very exciting indeed.
