To market to market to buy a fat parsnip, Home again home again jiggety arsenic. Hmm. Need to work on my poetry skills.

I'm doing flu symptoms. Marvelous. Heavy head and neck, back and limb ache, and feeling sick when I lie down. But Tom is in a worse state. He's lying in bed with a hot-water bottle on his tummy and a wet flannel on his head, groaning (Tom, not the wet flannel, though that would be an interesting novelty Christmas present - a sound-effects face cloth...). And Belinda's just had the lurgy, so come to coffee morning at ours ... tomorrow! hehe, only joking. That would be a coffee morning and a half. We could provide sick buckets and boiled rice (my mum's answer to nausea), and you could watch as our washing line falls down, again (can't get it to stay up at the moment, so all our clothes are nicely brown and crumbly from the earth they keep landing on...).

Freddie, on the other hand, is bouncing around full of beans and is working on the adjective 'smooooth' . This morning, he said to me 'Nother cuppa tea, mama?', and when I said 'Yes, I think I will', he said 'You stay 'ere, Mama, and I'll get the tea'. And on Monday, when my mum said 'Let's read a story, Freddie', Freddie said 'Good idea, Danny'. Belinda said to keep nurturing this talent for cheesy lines and offers of help, and soon we'll have a little wine waiter/tea-brewer on our hands. Which reminds me - the other day in a mummy-baby bath, Freddie poured me some water in his little beaker and said 'Glass of wine, mummy?'...

Phuh. Got a sore throat too. Nice.

I passed a kerfuffle the other day in town. An old-fashioned-looking coppa was blowing his whiste and shouting 'Stop her!'. I looked down the street and saw a very red-faced student-type coming to a halt on her bike. It turns out she was going the wrong way down a one-way street, and the copper wasted no time in telling her so. He said 'Now look what you've done! You're being embarrassed in front of ALL THESE PEOPLE', and indeed there was quite a little crowd of onlookers by then. Poor girl. I had to sympathise as I've done the very same thing without realising, plus plenty of people ignore the road signs on that road, wrong though that may be.

I also spotted a wedding party who were jangling along on bicycles, with tin cans clacking against the cobbles of Trinity Lane, and wedding guests bashing saucepans. A novel way to get to or from your wedding venue, I thought - bride and groom included.

Hmm, two and a half hours to go till Freddie's bedtime and therefore my bedtime. At least Belinda is here right now, responding to shouts of 'Aeloplane, Leeenda!' and shovelling pasta into the Monkey's mouth.

Which has given me an idea. Let's watch Bella Lasagne's Italian restaurant go on fire again on Fireman Sam, while the Aussie in the programme says 'I don't know, Bella, it's all Bolognese to me...'. Very funny, makers of Fireman Sam. Not that we've watched that particular episode about ten times...

Tune in next week if you haven't expired from boredom.
Kirstyx