It is early evening, and I am just dropping you a quick line before I go off to work.
It has been a very blustery day. You would barely need Winnie The Pooh’s umbrella to be blown away.
In our house he is known even to this day as Minnie Nuh Pooh, which was Lucy’s childhood name for him. She liked him very much, and several Minnie Nuh Pooh-imprinted items, such as the cereal bowls, have survived her tenure. She would not eat her breakfast out of anything else. Her breakfast was weird anyway, being either a bowl of sweetcorn, or pasta with pesto. It didn’t seem weird at the time, just one of those things that happens when you are a parent.
She had a little Piglet that she loved very much. It was small enough to fit into her hand and be clutched and sucked, and was an irritatingly expensive item which had originally been removed from a redundant car safety belt. When he was lost and had to be replaced in a hurry after a couple of miserable bedtimes, we had to re-purchase the whole safety belt, and throw the rest away.
She took him with her when we went on holiday to Istanbul, aged three. She rode in a child back-pack on Mark’s shoulders, and was tiresomely rude and unwelcoming to kindly Turks who wanted to give her kisses and sweets. Between Lucy’s indignant yells of No Go Away Horrid Person, and Piglet being dropped and lost several times an hour, it was a wearisome holiday.
On the third day, when she wanted to take Piglet in the back pack with her, my patience gave way.
You can only take Piglet, I said, authoritatively, if you promise to be polite and smiley to people all day. You must say Thank You Very Much, and smile politely whenever somebody gives you something nice. If you promise to do that, you can take Piglet with you.
Lucy glowered at me from under lowered brows. Then she put Piglet down on the bed and stood up.
I ready to go now, she said.
The other Minnie Nuh Pooh incident came when she wanted a pair of Tigger pyjamas in Asda once, roughly around the same time, although obviously we were back from Istanbul by then. They were fifteen quid, and she refused to wear pyjamas in bed anyway, so we declined to purchase them.
We were halfway around Asda before we realised that we had lost her.
Obviously it did not take much working out, and we belted off back to the Tigger pyjamas, where there was no Lucy, just her clothes in a little pile on the floor.
At that moment a voice came over the tannoy requesting that the parents of the screaming ginger toddler, captured whilst running away through the car park in the rain, dressed in a pair of Tigger pyjamas, kindly collect her from the Information Desk immediately, please, because everybody’s patience with her bellowing resistance was beginning to wear thin.
It is so lovely to have grown-up children. The magical times of the early years were all very well, but I am profoundly relieved that they are over. One small poopy is quite exhausting enough for anybody.
I pegged the washing firmly to the line and trekked over the fell this morning. It turned out that we had had a narrow escape, because yesterday was the day of the flying ants, and we managed to miss them completely. We heard about them several times over, from everybody that we usually meet on our walk, some of whom had found themselves surrounded by dense clouds of them. I didn’t think that they stung you, but everybody who had met them insisted that they did.
They only fly on one day in the year, and so it will be another year before we need to avoid them again.
It occurs to me that I have filled today’s page with reminiscence and not much news, but there isn’t any anyway, certainly nothing as exciting as yesterday’s tax return adventures.
I had better go to work. Perhaps I will have some adventures there.
