Walking and Talking

I still have to tell you about our bread making exploits, and our trip to the food festival, but my mind has been distracted by other things, well one other thing in particular, and I need to share it with you.

Recently, Matilda and I have watched quite a lot of history programmes.  We are watching the excellent series on The Normans, by the BBC.  There are only three episodes, but we have other things to fit in between the episodes and lots of film making to do, so we like to take things at a leisurely pace.  We are also fitting in programmes on Rome in between our English history. It’s all go here at the coal face of home education.

Last night we also watched a fascinating programme on BBC4 about Anglo Saxon treasures, which was presented by an art historian.  She showed how the decoration on the treasures changed as England evolved under different cultures and leaders, from Roman influences, through the beliefs of the Danes and Vikings and on into the early Christian church, both with input from the Irish church, and the early church in Rome.  It was wonderful, and there were lots of sparkly bling things to delight the heart.

What I have noticed in both these programmes though is a new fashion in the world of presenting historical information.  It seems that it is very important, while you are telling your public about Dane Law, or the Book of Kells or William the Conqueror, that you stride about purposefully.  It is not the done thing anymore to sit down and look earnest.  You must keep moving. 

I wonder why this is?

Perhaps it is so that you are not an easy target for the anti-history documentary brigade.  Those guerilla groups who think that there should be more current affairs programmes on the telly, and that tax payers money is being wasted with all this nonsense about the past, and glorified field trips to Normandy?

Perhaps the blame should be laid at Simon Schama’s door?  He has been responsible for revolutionising the world of the historical television programming after all.  No more the balding man with the crazy  comb over and leather look patches on his tweed blazer.  No more pointing at photographs of a series of low walls in the drizzle at three in the morning while the Open University theme tune bongs away in the background.

No, Simon has made history sexy.  With his tousled, come hither hair, his focus on sex, scandal and all that is salacious, and his leather jackets flying in the wind as he strides purposefully across a windswept beach.

Well, I don’t mind when Simon does it.  He makes it look easy.  But that must be the touch of a true master.  Because it really isn’t easy.  I watched the poor Professor Robert Bartlett,  talking about the Normans whilst huffing and puffing up hill and down dale.  He looked knackered.  When he was manfully slogging through the fen lands, up to his ankles in cold, boggy water, you could tell his mind wasn’t on Hereward the Wake, it was on the fact that his socks were sopping, and what he really wanted was to sit down and have a cup of tea and a towel down in front of a roaring log fire.

Similarly Dr. Nina Ramirez, who we watched last night was toiling away, mostly marching through the highways and byways of Kent whilst expounding the glories of this belt buckle and that sword, all the time wearing three inch high stiletto, winkle picker boots, and looking extraordinarily uncomfortable.

I found it very distracting if I’m honest.  I kept thinking: ‘Oh lovey.  Just sit down for a minute.  Your feet must be killing you. Surely you should have picked a more sensible shoe, or possibly just taken a taxi?’

I have decided to found an anti-striding movement, solely for the world of history based television programmes.  I shall start with with a petition to the BBC.  I prefer my presenters sedentary, or at least more limber if they will insist on wandering about all the time.  Perhaps I could start a collection and use it to fund ‘The Simon Schama Historical Fitness Programme’?

Clearly anyone can find out about history, but it is a whole other ball game walking and talking about it at the same time.  It is something best left to the experts.

Simon, we salute you and your skilful perambulations.

When I grow up…

In the Burlington Arcade just off Piccadilly in London is Penhaligons.  Penhaligons make and sell delicious perfumes in a very old fashioned way.  Their shop is a haven of polished oak counters and big glass bottles with stoppers that you can lift off to release the aroma of limes and orange blossom and other scrumptious scents.  It is luxurious and traditional, and has been around since 1870.

They are quite good at what they do, having had that much practice.  Penhaligons is not really about contemporary perfume trends.  It is about real, old fashioned, lovely smells, that smell like what they tell you they’re going to smell like, and not the contents of a chemical dump with the acrid tang of fake roses poured on top.

As well as their regular scents, they also have a scent archive, and can recreate perfumes from as early as 1927.  They describe themselves as purveying vintage English perfumes.  I love the word vintage, but it is getting a trifle over used these days.  On the other hand I think if you’ve been making perfume since 1870 you are entitled to use it.  I give you my permission.

I’m so gracious.

We popped into Penhaligons (one should always pop into  shop that is as onomatopaeic as Penhaligons I think) on our travels, and sniffed everything in sight.  The lady behind the counter, who was a lady of a certain age but immaculately presented (her entire outfit probably cost as much as my entire wardrobe), took a shine to Matilda, and smothered her in delightful smells whilst giving her a lecture on how important it was to lead a life of luxury and privilege, while at the same time making sure you paid for it with your own money, and didn’t sponge off a rich husband!  Another valuable home educating lesson learned.

We had great fun.

On the way out, I stopped to take a photograph of the shop to remind me to write everything down.  I noticed their tag line and loved it.  Look:

When I grow up, I’m going to be a Merchant of Attraction.

I wonder if you can take lessons?

Pretty Pictures of London

While Tilly and I were educating ourselves on the niceties of how to be ladies of leisure in London last week, I took some pictures.  It has taken me this long to upload them, because I am idle, and prefer to sit on my CLD ™, eating hand crafted chocolates and musing the great philosophical questions of the day (is Simon Cowell actually an android?)

Spurred on by the fact that Tilly is doing some maths practice, and it is best if I am out of the room so that neither of us cry, I shall share some more fuzzy images with you:

I am a late adopter into the world of luxury gloves, but boy, these babies from Sermoneta in Burlington Arcade off Piccadilly really made my heart sing.  They had every colour you could think of, and every style.  I loved the black ones which had different coloured panels down the edges of each finger.  They look so sensible until you reach out to touch something and then it is like a rainbow explosion.  Tilly liked the mid length black ones with red leather button details.  They were all fabulous.

Also in Burlington Arcade, the luxe macaroon makers Laduree had decided to go with the more is more approach to interior design, and who can blame them?

Would modom like some bling with her macaroons?

Too bloody right.

Here are the cutest marzipan vampires ever created:

You can buy them from Fortnum and Mason, along with glittery chocolate skulls, severed chocolate fingers oozing with blood and other Halloween delights.

Liberty was a treasure trove of earthly delights, and there is so much of it:

Tilly was in charge of our expotition, so we only got to briefly whizz through women’s wear on the way to somewhere else:

but there were enough other things that delighted me.  I wanted this, elaborate headdress:

Which I envisaged wearing on the school run.  Very practical, as long as lightning doesn’t strike.

I like this lamp very much:

I would have bought it, but I don’t have a desk big enough to fit it.  Alas.

The Manolo Blahnik room on the first floor was to die for.  I got somewhat distracted from the shoes by this fellow:

Despite the lack of legs to model shoes. I like the fact that he had made an effort with a Manolo scarf.  I thought I’d put him on the wall, opposite this sorry fellow:

who was gracing the wall in the Christmas decoration department.  He looks like he’s had one too many rum and coke’s, no?

On a more serious note, I fell head over heels in love with this astonishing kilim:

Which was huge, and delicious.  It made me think of sand and the sea all at the same time, but then I think the Arabic word for desert is something like the dry sea, so it makes perfect sense.  It is top of my fantasy christmas wish list so far this year.

This is bottom:

It is a tea tray in case you’re wondering.  Clearly the staff were unsure as to which department this would be best suited to.  Note the ambivalent label: ‘Gift’.  Hmmm.  There was a whole range of other serving ware with equally bizarre animal/human hybrids adorning them.  We were tempted to get one for Jason as a joke, until we realised that at £70, it was rather an expensive joke.  Still, someone must like them, right?

Faversham Favours the Brave

This will be my final blog post about Kent. I think even I, long winded woman that I am, have managed to drag out the ‘What I did on my summer holidays’ epic long enough.  I couldn’t leave without mentioning our day out in Faversham though, mainly because I need to give credit to my old friend David for sheltering us, feeding us and providing us with a fine day’s entertainment.

David and I, as regular readers might remember, went to school together as feckless teenagers.  Then there was a large, twenty something year gap in our friendship while we both whirled off to have fascinatingly rich and resplendent lives.  It was the power of Facebook that brought us together again, and though it may not be my favourite thing in the whole world, I do have to thank it for that.

Usually David and I meet in London and do theatrical, lunchy type things where I pretend I have no children and he pretends he has no cat.

This was the first time he would be meeting the children, and to say I was apprehensive would be an understatement.  The summer holidays were not a time of smooth relations and obedience in all things where the children were concerned.  Mostly it was about out and and out warfare, the occasional bit of bloodshed, and making it through to the end of the day with all your limbs intact if you were lucky.

Our holiday was in the last week of the summer holidays.  Our trip to see David was actually on the first day of term.  Tallulah should have been handing in her project on the Egyptians.  Instead she was swanning off to Faversham to terrorise my friends.  It was all very alarming.  By this time I was tired with a capital ‘T’ and had aged about forty years in the previous six weeks.

On the way there I read the riot act.  I was not convinced it would work, but felt that it was important to give it a try.

It was the one day of the whole holiday when all of them were impeccably behaved, polite and absolutely lovely.  They were still loud, don’t get me wrong.  We are not talking alien pod snatching good, but still, they didn’t punch each other, run off, swear or merely lay down on the floor and refuse to co-operate.

As such it was a really lovely day.

We arrived Chez David, and wandered out to sit in the sunshine of his back garden with a drink and a snack, while I adjusted myself to the fact that the children were being lovely, David adjusted himself to seeing me in full on mummy mode, and the children got on with running round the garden and tying each other to the shrubbery.

David warned me that there was a pond at the bottom of the garden.  I warned the children not to drown or I would kill them.  They galloped off to inspect it and came back brimming, literally brimming with excitement.  Tallulah announced grandly: ‘There’s a giant, dead hedgehog in the pond.’  To which I made ‘pshaws’ of disbelief, until the other two backed her to the hilt, gleefully.

David looked mortified.

We set off to explore.

There was indeed a giant, dead hedgehog floating in the pond.  It was bobbing peacefully about, minding its own business.

David practically fainted with horror and shame at the fact that he had inadvertently scarred my children for life.

The children capered around demanding burial rites and having a high old time.

I referred David to the tragic, yet highly enjoyable mouse burial we had enacted only a few weeks before.  I suggested that he had instead of traumatising them, in fact, made their entire week.

After seeing their faces, he did indeed have to concur that they did not really appear to be traumatised in any way.  Their faces reflected more an eagerness to get cracking with grave digging.

I was the one who had to pour cold water on that idea.  We had no idea how long the hedgehog had been in the pond, nor what size he had been when he went in.  I had visions of attempting to scoop him out, and realising that far from being big he was merely swollen with rotting hedgehog gases, this just before he exploded in our faces.

We abandoned the hedgehog to its bobbing, much to the children’s disgust, and went out for lunch instead.

Faversham is rather nice.  It has a large selection of old fashioned sweet shops, which we sampled at various points, a decent pizzeria, a fantastic hat shop, where I purchased my wonderful top hat (pictures to come after I’ve had my hair cut next week), and lots of hops.  The hops thing is temporary.  We had just turned up two days before the annual hop festival, so there was lots of foliage and a rather beery aroma.

In the afternoon David got us a pre preview preview of an exhibition called ‘A Year in the Life of Faversham’.  It was a community project where people were invited to take a photo of Faversham every day of the year.  The best from each day was exhibited in Faversham’s old drill hall over the Hop Festival weekend.  Some of David’s photographs were in the show, and we got to see them first.  It was a lovely idea, clever, creative and beautifully displayed.  There were all kinds of photos there.  The only criteria was that they had to have been taken within a 5km radius of the centre of Faversham.  Some of them were funny, some were beautiful and they were all interesting.

The best ones were a set of pictures where the group  who organised the exhibition had found old archive photos of Faversham from the last 150 years.  They then challenged photographers to recreate the old photographs in a modern context.  In the show the pictures were hung together, old and new, so you could compare and contrast, and they were truly fascinating.

The children were just as interested as I was, and we really felt truly privileged to have been given the first look.  Indeed, they were still hanging some of the photographs as we were going around.

I think it’s a brilliant idea, and Tilly and I have decided to try and recreate it in miniature over the space of one month, starting in October.  That is, if I remember when October actually starts.  It will be fun.

To finish off the day perfectly, David gave me one of his photographs as a gift.  It is quite beautiful.  It shows a plume of smoke from an incense stick rising against a white background.  He has done technical and clever things to it so that the smoke is depicted in rich blues and browns, and unless I had told you what it was it would be really hard to tell it is so abstract.  It is exquisite.  It is also at the framers, so I cannot take a picture of it to show you until I get it back.

So, thank you David for a lovely day.

Oscar confided in me on our tour around Faversham that David was his friend.  I asked him why he had decided this.  He said: ‘David is my friend because he is A BOY.  Also, he is not like Tallulah at all.’

I said: ‘Is not being like Tallulah a good thing?’

He said: ‘YES. IT. IS.’

So there you go.

p.s. The hedgehog got catapulted over the garden wall into the path of the oncoming high speed train from Ashford to London.

Rest in peace hedgehog.  It was not a dignified end, but I bet you startled a lot of commuters out of their work related ennui.  Hedgehog Valhalla awaits you.

Do Spiders Like Jam?

We went to a Food Festival today at Belgrave Hall in Leicester, more of which, later.

While we were there I wandered past two women having the most intriguing conversation.  One woman leaned earnestly in to the other and said:

‘Yes. Well. You know that Doreen always was a bit strange.  After all, she used to leave spoonfuls of jam out for the spiders…’

Why? Oh why did she do this readers?

Is it merely total insanity on Doreen’s part, or do spiders actually like jam?  Maybe it was a cunning spider trap and she was laying a spoonful of raspberry (seedless) conserve under each spider’s hidey hole to trap them before carting them off to their spidery doom?

Anyone have any ideas?

Camber Sands

While we were on holiday we had lots of plans.  Most of them did not come to fruition. 

This was no bad thing.  We were enjoying ourselves far too much staying within easy reach of Rye to miss driving about the countryside hell for leather with three excitable children, who were just as happy to spend the afternoon at Camber Sands as they were to drive forty miles to look at a Medieval castle.  In fact, much happier. 

It really is true that if you give a child a bucket, a spade, four thousand tonnes of sand and some water, they will be blissfully contented and require nothing more than the odd ice cream and grit filled sandwich to refuel their batteries before they set off again.  We spent several such afternoons and the children are in unilateral agreement that this was the best part of their holiday.

I confess that the lure of sand has worn off for me in my later years.  I am now all too aware of sand’s dastardly propensity to creep into areas it has no business being in; arse cracks; sandwiches; toes; cars and in fact everything you touch for twelve months after your holiday has finished.  I find it thoroughly aggravating.  If it would just stay put I would be much more enamoured of it.

Nevertheless, I am able to remember with great fondness my own windswept, sand fuelled holidays in East Anglia as a child, always out of season, and bitterly cold, but fun nonetheless.  This makes it impossible to begrudge my own children their afternoon on the sand, although I have my limits.  An afternoon is as much as I can stand, and then only if there are refreshments.

My parents were much more liberal about the beach than me. I remember holidays where my dad, after having driven for hours, and my mum, after having decanted all our belongings into a damp, self catering holiday flat, would nevertheless allow us to go on the beach on the same day we actually arrived on our holiday.  Sometimes this would mean digging in the dusk as the rain pelted down onto our cagoules (cagoules were a staple of my childhood holidays. Bugger bikinis), but we were addicted.  We didn’t care if it snowed.  I expect sometimes it did.  I remember a particularly gruesome holiday in Llandudno in my mid teens in which we drove there in a blizzard, visited Port Meirion in a blizzard and went up the Great Orme in a blizzard.  Happy days.

I have to say though, that if I were required to spend the afternoon on a beach, Camber Sands is not a bad place to be.  It has miles of proper, golden sand which is clean and child friendly.  The water is shallow for a long way with relatively few stones and sharp, spiky things underfoot.  There are no nasty shelves of coastline cunningly disguised, for the children to fall down, and the dunes behind the beach do much to baffle the effects of the wind.

In the car park, which you have to pay for (outrage) there is a cafe, a shop selling buckets, spades and all manner of inflatable toy that you might suddenly require, and a decent set of toilets.  There are also taps outside for you to wash your sandy extremities before you attempt your journey home.

It is the most sophisticated beach I have visited in years.

Having said that I still found sand in Tilly’s bed when I changed the sheets last week.  So it hasn’t entirely changed my opinion, merely softened the blow slightly.

All’s Well that Ends Well

Yesterday was one of those days.

It was partially my fault, it has to be confessed.  On Friday after school I had rather a lot to do.  We were going for a second viewing of the Gothic Munster house of my dreams, and I needed to get the children fed in a hurry before we went.  I also had alarming amounts of laundry which were lying in festering clumps, taking over the house.  I started cooking the dinner, put the washing machine on, and threw the wet clothes from the last load into the tumble drier.  So far, so good.

About ten minutes in I had to go upstairs to break up a fight.  It took a while.

I got downstairs to find the tumble drier making a sort of strange whirring sound, and the smell of lightly toasting fabric.

I opened the door of the drier to find that one of the sheets that I had so hastily thrown in hadn’t been entirely in the drum, and had gotten snagged on the door mechanism.  This meant that the drum could not turn properly, and the whole mechanism seemed to have jammed.

Eek.

I freed everything up, hurled it back inside and pressed start, praying furiously the whole time.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that the troubling whirring noise had stopped, so had the drum.  The machine just got hotter and hotter until I lost my nerve and turned the whole thing off.

Then I had to confess to Jason.

He was calm. Calm and resigned.  I think I’d have preferred it if he had shouted and jumped up and down.

We went to the viewing.  It went well. We are one step nearer to living in a glorious house and eating Tesco saver beans whilst wearing balaclavas to keep ourselves warm in order to pay for it all.

We got home and while I put the children to bed, Jason disembowelled the tumble drier on the kitchen floor.

It turns out that I had snapped the belt thingy.

In the morning, when he rang the tumble drier repair corps, they said it would be £105 minimum just to come out.

In light of the fact that there is an impending economy drive thanks to our desire to live in a decadent house, Jason decided that this would not do.  He showed me the remains of the drier, and pointed out that it was relatively simple, with very few parts, and that any man with half a brain could probably fix it himself.

He had more than half a brain.

He was going to attempt to fix it.

I merely nodded. I thought that this was the best policy, all things considered.

He wandered off with Oscar in tow to the tumble drier repair shop, while I did karate duty.

He came back just as it was time to prepare lunch.  Let me tell you that it is not easy trying to cook lunch for five people when you have an amateur tumble drier repair man littering your kitchen with bits of fluff and innards, and using your largest saucepan to boil drier belts until the whole kitchen reeks of rubber.

There was a great deal of inventive swearing.  Most of it from Jason.

We ate lunch next to the drier, which he had decided to lift onto the table to make it easier to get to.

There were little clouds of grey fluff descending into the Thai curry, and it was all rather surreal.

After lunch he hammered and swore for a bit longer, and then it was time for the grand switch on.  We all stood in the doorway in case of explosions, while Jason approached from afar, wearing his best, rubber soled shoes.  He turned it on.

Nothing happened.

He had fixed the belt, but something else had broken during the reassembling moment.

There was considerably more swearing.

While he was buying the drier belt he had bonded with the man in the repair shop, who had informed him that should all go wrong, he would be willing to help out, and his prices were much more reasonable than the manufacturers.  Jason called him and confessed failure. I thought he might actually cry.

Then we had to get it to the shop.

Jason decided that I must come with him, so that I could help him lift it.  I thought that the man from the shop, who did this sort of thing all the time, would probably have a set of wheels and a spare pair of arms to help him, but didn’t want to seem unsupportive, so agreed meekly. 

This of course necessitated the entire family coming, as we could not leave the children behind at home, frolicking in the remaining clouds of grey fluff that we didn’t manage to eat with our lunch.

This meant going in convoy, as trying to fit five people and a tumble drier into a VW Polo is something they only do in the Guinness Book of Records.

The children were not impressed as they had been promised an afternoon of making post boxes out of cardboard, and quad bikes out of Lego.  There was mutiny in the ranks.  It was not pretty.  Jason took the mutineers.  I took the tumble drier.

When we got there, the man came out to help with a pair of wheels and an extra pair of arms.  I didn’t even have to get out of the car.

Who knew?

Then Jason decided that he could no longer live with the fact that my car was now 50% residue from Camber Sands, 40% tumble drier fluff and 10% raisins mixed with mashed crisps.  He ordered me to follow him to the car valeting place, where we would get our cars valeted.  I wasn’t thrilled.  It takes ages.  It is always busy.  It is in a godforsaken hole where the wind whips across the forecourt like it’s coming down from the Siberian plains, and I had had enough.

He brooked no argument.

We went.

There was a huge queue.  The children were utterly fed up, as was I.

There was a retail park five minutes way. Jason abandoned my car, threw us all into his and dropped us outside ToysRUs with the instruction that Oscar start making a birthday list, and he would come and fetch us when the cars were clean.

I think this was the only thing that saved him death by disgruntled family.

ToysRUs on a cold Saturday afternoon is a living purgatory, but not as bad as a windswept forecourt, so we made the best of it.  Oscar has decided that he would like the whole shop, except for the Barbie aisles.  We are not really any further forward with the birthday plans.

After twenty minutes Jason rang me to say that he was coming to get us.  The cars were still filthy, the queues were backing up and there was only one man and a bucket dealing with everything.

We drove home in sullen silence.

When I was nose down in a restorative cup of coffee, Jason started making noises about mowing the lawn.

We had words.

The lawn remains unmowed, but we do have two large cardboard postboxes and a Lego quad bike.

I know my place

Oscar: ‘Dada?’

Jason: ‘Yes, Oscar?’

Oscar: ‘You are my BEST friend, and I want to live with you in your house forever, and marry you.’

Jason: ‘That’s very nice of you Oscar. Thank you.  But what about mama?’

Oscar: ‘No. I don’t want to live with HER.  ONLY YOU.’

Jason: ‘Oh dear. But what about when mama cooks you dinners, and reads you nice stories?’

Oscar: ‘Well. I still don’t want to live with her, but she can come around to cook the dinner, and for story time.’

Jason: ‘Right. Like a servant you mean?’

Oscar: ‘Yes. Like a servant who doesn’t live with us.  She can be a servant who just visits us. Okay?’

Smellovision

I am preparing the dinner when Tallulah bobs her head round the kitchen door…

Tallulah: ‘Mama, I think I could probably recognise you in a room full of people even if I was blind.’

Me: ‘Oh! Really?’

Tallulah: ‘Yes I could.  Because, you see mama, you smell very strong.’

Me: ‘Oh! Do I?’ (thinks; ‘Dear God! It is half past four on Saturday. I have been out and about all day.  Have I been knocking people out with my odiferous whiff?)

I do that thing where you surreptitiously try to sniff your own armpits while making it look like that’s not really what I’m doing. (It never works).

There is a pregnant pause, during which I age twenty years while Tallulah smiles at me serenely.

Tallulah: (blithely): ‘Yes. You smell delicious.  You should wear that perfume all the time.  It is my favourite smell.’

Me: ‘Thank you Tallulah. That is very kind.’ (thinks: ‘Phew! not Ewwww!)

What are little guinea pigs made of?

Tilly went round to a friend’s house this morning.  Her children are also home schooled, and they live just across the road.  This is very useful indeed, and the children are all lovely, so we are very happy.

Tilly was entranced when she went over there a few afternoons ago to find that they have pet guinea pigs.  They invited her to come over this morning and help clean the guinea pigs out.  Knowing that the pooh element would be far outshone by the cuddling guinea pigs element she accepted with alacrity, and I lost her to the world of small, squeaky mammals for two hours.  In fact, so wonderful was it, that I had to go over there and drag her across the road by the tips of her owly ears, protesting muchly.

We were half way to granny’s house when she piped up:

Tilly: ‘Mama?’

Me: ‘Yes.’

Tilly: ‘Where do you get guinea pigs from?’

Me: ‘You mean a pet shop?’

Tilly: ‘No. I mean .Where.  Where are they from?’

Me: ‘Two other guinea pigs who are consenting adults who love each other very much?’

Tilly: ‘No. I mean. WHERE. Where. Where are they from?’

Me: ‘In the wild, you mean? New Guinea I think.’

Tilly: ‘No. Well. They’re not in the wild are they? You don’t see them frisking about in fields like rabbits and things do you?’

Me: ‘No. Not in this country. But there are other countries in the world where animals are allowed to roam about in the wild’

Tilly: (in the tone of voice that totally dismisses that such things would be possible): ‘Well, okaaaaay (not), but how would they get here then, eh?’

Me: ‘Maybe people would import them perhaps?’

Tilly: (Clearly totally unconvinced): ‘Maybe…’

Me: ‘Well, it’s either that, passports or an elaborate system of undersea tunnels.’

Tilly: ‘Oh.  I thought you made guinea pigs?’

Me: (totally confused by now): ‘What? Like in a factory?’

Tilly: (utterly frustrated): ‘NO!’

Me: (equally frustrated): ‘Well, bloody well what then?’

Tilly: (waving her hands about like a deranged jellyfish): ‘I don’t know.  I just thought somehow you made them….kind of like out of other animals.’

Me: ‘Oh yes! That’s right.  Your average guinea pig is actually one part weasel to two parts vole.  The ones with the funny hair are three parts muskrat to one part hamster.’

Tilly: ‘Muuuuuuummmmmmm! You know what I mean!’

Me: ‘Clearly not.’