as if by magic

Rather handily, my mother happened to have recently knitted Edgar a hat which is not only of a superior style to his other recently-acquired hat but is also of a much superior colour, being brown rather than denimiferously blue. Unfortunately its existence was unknown when I took him out for a wander and to buy a newspaper and some muffins in the morning and had been temporarily misplaced by the time the afternoon arrived, though hooded garments were available instead. My sister, mother and Nicky were popping out for a fancy tea at the fancy hotel in place of attending my sister's hen do leaving me and my dad in charge of the wingpiglet for most of the afternoon, so we popped out to trundle through the wind and wind-blown wave-splash spray along the prom with the intention of stopping at the café at around the time when he'd be due a feed so that we could heat up some of his milk and recharge him with it with the convenience of seats and a table and the added bonus of cakes and coffee whilst so doing. As he woke up just before we stopped, woke further up when we went inside and started getting a bit gripey by the time a table became available and we sat down I assumed he was just getting hungry and proceeded to prepare the necessary equipment and materials but he quickly got to the point where he was squealing, refusing to take the offered milks and generally not acting at all like the generally-quite-happy thing he generally is. Taking it in turns to take him for a jiggle up and down outside kept him quiet for long enough for each of us to gobble our cakes and finish our coffees on at a time and he eventually calmed down enough to take a couple of mouthfuls in the shelter of a nearby building's entryway before going back to sleep almost as soon as he was dressed and rolling back homewards. I think our mistake was to go inside, where the noise and heat might have been greater contributory factors than any hunger he might have been experiencing. As we knew there wasn't anything desperately wrong with him it was almost more embarrassing than distressing to be the source of baby-screeching in a café in which people were trying to have relaxing cakes and cups of tea, though I hope the other occupants noted our concern for their ears by taking him outside. The staff didn't seem too bothered (though I'd assume they probably were slightly) and offered the use of one of their blankets to ease the quickly-taking-outside process, though my dad's fleece sufficed. Of course, he was quiet all the way home and quite happy to drink most of the bottle when we got back to the house shortly before everyone else got back in. Next time I shall stay outside.