Bloat

We had fun yesterday. Mummy drew the character Bloat from Finding Nemo. I think the correct designation for him is probably "puffer fish" but those people at Pixar never tell us that. All we hear is their names: Bloat, Gill and the others. Maybe these cartoon studios should consider telling us exactly what kind of creatures it is that we are seeing. We know that Marlin is a clown fish, that Bruce is a shark, that Nigel is a pelican and so on, but when we get to the aquarium in Australia, we're all left wondering. No wonder Nemo looks so confused most of the time he's in there.

Anyway, forget all that, mummy's puffer fish was a huge round circle with two blobs for eyes and then she and daddy and me all jabbed our crayons on it to make his spikes. Afterwards I drew some puffer fish myself, only mine weren't very round and the eyes looked a bit skew-whiff; almost as if my puffer fish had ingested some radioactive weed or swum through an oil slick.

I suppose Mark would have been there too, but he'd just shit himself and, having just passed the stage where the warm and nice feeling in your pants has turned into a cold and sticky and not very nice one, he'd been taken upstairs to be cleaned. That's a pity because he might have enjoyed seeing all of us jabbing crayons on the paper and shrieking with laughter.

It rained later that evening and daddy and I stood at the window watching the lightning, listening for thunder and hoping that no motorists would scratch his car as they tried to inch past it and a bike that had been parked carelessly opposite. I think daddy swore, and pretty soon he went out to move the car. I came out as well and got my pyjama bottoms wet. It's funny, while daddy managed to get in and out with barely a drop of rain on him, I got the bottom of my trousers wet and I fell over twice. Mummy and daddy always give each other a funny look when I fall over but you know, what goes around comes around and when, years from now, Mark and I are visiting them in The Larches or some other retirement home, we'll give each other a funny look as well when the day-care assistant says, "your dad took another small tumble last night but he's OK. He's just a little confused."