Kanga and Roo

When I got home, I listened to a message on my phone telling me the penguin had been handed in at the supermarket and I could pick him up anytime. I walked over and felt a little embarrassed as three members of staff spent a good ten minutes trying to find him.

They discovered a pair of rather unattractive brown slip-on shoes, a court-jester permanently frozen in a star jump, and a dark, lumpy object they never removed from the bag long enough for me to identify. But no penguin.

Finally, someone came across a clue in an intricately handwritten entry in the checkout handover book and soon afterwards emerged from a cupboard next to the lift bearing the flightless bird aloft, grinning (I think) at the thought of me carrying him down the main street, still busy at that hour.

But I slipped out by the car park and returned the back way, feeling, appropriately, in a monochrome state of mind.