uninhirritable

I had been expecting a bit of today's chat to relate to how I apparently never stopped screaming as an infant and never ever slept but not to learn that I apparently genuinely did wail all the time, not just during the couple of hours remaining in the day when not feeding and that I appeared not to get the twenty hours of sleep newborns are supposed to get and that as a measure of desperation I was administered the fashionable child wail-suppressants of the time that are now all rightly discouraged or no longer available. Surely simple foam earplugs were available at the time, permitting restfulness in parents and sisters whilst not potentially endangering the shrieking baby, particularly when one of the side-effects seems to be "unexpected increase in excitability in children" which is surely the complete opposite to the desired outcome? I now feel quite within my rights to have pretended to have ignored all efforts to teach me to read or speak until going to school (suddenly exhibiting the abilities) and to have deliberately impaled my thumb on a staple when I was four. The wingpiglet behaved quite satisfactorily for most of the day after meeting its other set of grandparents though has had a few wails and complaints to back up our assertions that he hasn't been completely placid so far. Although he still occasionally works himself into a state which can only be calmed by Nicky or her special maternal abilities I'm always quite pleased when I can take him off someone at whom he's started grumbling and get him to quieten down again by various forms of jiggling and speaking.

Not only was the route we took to the seafront this afternoon much quieter and more pleasant than the seemingly most direct route it also seems to be fractionally shorter and quicker, which came in handy when I realised how late it was and that the shop which had replaced my broken spoke less than half an hour after dropping the wheel off was closing in forty-five minutes and was a mile in the other direction from the house to the seventy-five minute journey we'd just made to the beach, though setting off on my own meant that I had time to get to the shop, pick up the wheel and then get back almost to the house in time to serendipitously intercept everyone else just before they got there. It seems like ages since I've had a nice fast walk and a day featuring two chocolatey cakes and a rare haggis supper is the best sort of day to get one on. As yesterday evening's shoe-testing run didn't end up starting until after midnight there's a chance I might actually be in calorific deficit for the last twenty-four hours. Only a small chance, though. I still haven't had a proper look round but I must get on with working out where the nearest source of take-away falafels is to be found so that days when we can't be bothered to cook anything can be solved with substances other than chips, even when we have my parents as guests and have their odd habit of always wanting chips at least once when they're visiting to feed.