Diversionary tactic

Here is my attempt at looking the other way for the next few hours, to try and coax myself gently into tomorrow. A bit of 'yumour.

The going-to-bed conversations between moi and Steve have been hilarious of late. But I keep forgetting them. I must remember to take something in to my night stand so I can write them down. Night stand? Bedside table? What is the difference? Do wealthy people in big English country homes or Park Avenue apartments have night stands? I definitely have a bedside table. Not that it's a table.

What a stupid name for a piece of furniture. Either of them.

But I digress. The other night, I recounted to Steve my realisation of only just a few short years back - that I had been lied to mercilessly about the whereabouts of my Dummy. I give it a capital D because... well, frankly, I can remember it and it meant that much to me. It was on a chain and I remember chewing that filthy old rubber teat on it and the taste (it tasted like chicken... no it didn't, it tasted like filthy old rubber) and the loud squeaky sound of it being squished between my teeth.

Then we went on a holiday. The only two things I remember about this holiday were seeing some long-dead important man's chair in a glass box (it was outdoors if my memory serves me correctly though surely that can't be right) and it had the stuffing coming out of the seat and I vividly remember thinking "Who would want to sit in a chair like that, how dumb". And the other painfully clear memory is me sitting and trying not to panic as my parents hunted high and low for my dummy while also packing and getting the kids organised to leave the place where we'd been staying.

They never found it *cue Lisa McCune walking off to the side of the camera in a black trench coat, all sullen and forensic-minded and serious like*

Now...... I've thought about this on and off over the years. I see it like an old blurry fading photo in my mind. And now I'm convinced:

There was no way I could have, would have, lost my prized dummy - it was on a chain and I practically wanted to marry it. So why would I have been so careless? No, something fishy was afoot and I think I can point the finger squarely at either or both Mum and Dad.

When I mentioned this crime to Steve, he suggested that maybe I should have looked in Mum's handbag. "Why would she put it in her handbag? Nooo you put it straight in the bin, if you decide to take your child's dummy away you have to commit and you're not committed if you keep it on you just in case," I retorted.

I also mused at the foul state of my manky, mangled dummy and that they couldn't have replaced it very often. To which I was offered, "Well maybe they thought 'If we just don't wash it, don't replace it, never take it off her, she'll eventually think it's so disgusting that she won't want it anymore.' And when that didn't work, they just stole it."

True, true. I'm sure that's what did happen.

And I vowed there and then, as Steve is my witness, that I will let the LGBB give over her dearly beloved dummy - for o how she loves it so* - when she's ready. Even if she's in grade 4.

*This bit spoken really fast like one of those Spoken By credits at the end of a political campaign ad: She only has it for bedtime and thank God for small mercies and some sort of rational thinking back there in the first 4 weeks, otherwise she'd be loving and tending and petting it every minute of the day.