Weevilstepmother Hear no weevil, see no weevil, speak no weevil

Ex Post Facto

Ready, Steady... Eat

We had the unusual experience of all sitting round the table this morning for breakfast at the same time. The normal getting up range in this house is from about 6.30 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. so we never actually all meet at breakfast time, unless like today we have made a date for a cooked breakfast.

Tallboy and the Steps have prodigious appetites and the ability almost to inhale the food on their plates. For a few minutes, the only sounds were those of rampant consumption. Then we reached the point where the urge to shovel diminished and conversation became possible. I say conversation, though it started off more as mocking.

I simply observed that tinned tomatoes and baked beans had no place being on the same plate together, a view shared by none of my companions. The arrangement of my food then became the subject of joshing, though I can't see what is unreasonable about constructing a Thames Barrier of hash browns to prevent my egg yolk coming into contact with my bean juice.

The conversation somehow moved on to weird things we had eaten over the years.

As a child, I sampled Go-Cat with no ill effects, and once ate a couple of mouthfuls of raw minced beef to see what it was like. No wonder I turned veggie. When I was in my late teens I once ate a contact lens. This was, I stress, unintentional. I had hard lenses, which if not sited correctly had a habit of pinging out of my eye when I blinked. I was muzzy that morning and didn't put it in properly. Nor did I notice when it came out. I simply continued to eat my bowl of crunchy corn flakes. Then I wondered why it was so difficult to focus...

Methane Boy admits to eating cat chocolates one Christmas. Like chocolate but different, apparently. He also reports that Beyblade Boy once asked him "Would you ever eat tinned cat food?" "Maybe," was the response. "Do it now, do it now," urged Beyblade Boy. He didn't, but says it remains on his list of things to do.

StepD used to eat all sorts of non-food items. Dolls' shoes mainly. And feet. Dolls' feet that is - only a very few of her dolls have un-gnawed feet. Once Methane Boy was taking apart a remote control car "to see how it worked". When the time came to put it back together, there was a screw missing. Yes, she had eaten it...

Tallboy at first would only admit to dog chocolate. But his cover was blown when someone wondered what a woodlouse would taste like. "Bitter, very bitter," was his unthinking response. He ate one deliberately aged about 5. "I almost ate an earwig once," he then volunteered. He had found a wooden pipe (of the smoking variety) in the garden and had stuck it in his mouth and sucked. Sensing a blockage, he sucked harder and harder until an alarmed earwig struck him in the back of the throat at high velocity. Fortunately he managed to encourage it back into the great outdoors.

The Sun was unimpressed. "That's nothing!" he said. "Once, I ate a Brussels Sprout!"

 

The Silence of the Pans

Around one o'clock this morning, when the dozen or so teenagers in the road outside had stopped shrieking, swearing, dropping bottles and kicking cans, I finally managed to drop off to sleep. Only to be woken at three o'clock by the kinds of messages from my bladder that won't pay attention to cotton wool imagery. On my way back to bed I heard a noise and stuck my head around the office door. The PC hadn't shut down properly and as it was sat on a wooden floor above the bedroom, the noise of the fan was hugely amplified.

There was no way I was going to get to sleep now I was aware of the noise so I felt my way up the wooden stairs, trying my best not to disturb Tallboy. Curious as to the error which had prevented shutdown, I peered at the screen, then recoiled in pain as my dark-adjusted eyes melted in the glare of millions of glowing transistors. Seriously, it really hurt. Mincing carefully down the stairs and back to bed, I lay there now fully awake and with a headache. I wasn't going to get back to sleep now. I could see only one course of action for today's modern, liberated woman. I was going to have to go and make some cocoa.

Obviously I didn't want to wake up the entire household at half past three in the morning, so I took care to make as little noise as possible. The stairs creaked as I glided down them, and Pesky greeted me loudly at the bottom of the stairs, charmed to have some company in the middle of the night. Praying that I wouldn't trip over the black cat in the unlit hallway, I went into the kitchen and decided that I would have to put on a light. My eyes probably couldn't melt any more. My fingers felt for the switch for the little light in the cooker hood in the knowledge that the wrong choice would have set the fan going at Mach 3.

In the feeble glow of my success I could see that there were no clean mugs, but that the dishwasher was winking at me from the other end of the kitchen. Opening it up and ducking the billow of steam, I hauled out the biggest mug and tried to shut it again. It was stuck, and it was too dark to see the obstruction. I jiggled and cajoled the thing, and it finally went back into place with a rattle of crockery that set my teeth on edge.

Now for a saucepan - at Weevil Mansions, these are cunningly displayed by means of a metal grid attached to the ceiling, from which the pans are suspended on hooks. It's an ideal way to store your pans whilst ensuring they are to hand whenever you need them. If you're as tall as Tallboy, that is. Not being 6'5", I tend to struggle a bit. I reached up on tiptoe and managed to unhook one, but a glancing blow from it on the way down had its neighbour clattering into the next one and so on, in a devilish Newton's Cradle kind of way.

Milk next. The noise the fridge door makes when it opens is clearly not noticeable in daylight but during the wee small hours it quite alarmed me. As it did when I had to go back to the fridge to get another bottle which actually had some milk in it. And a third time when I put that bottle back. Not to be outdone, the cupboard door emitted a sustained creak as I retrieved the cocoa powder.

I did manage successfully to negotiate heating the milk but found it impossible to mix it in without chinking repeatedly against the side of the mug. I was frazzled by the time I took it through to the front room to drink it, and felt that I would have made less noise if I had announced loudly at the top of the stairs, "I am just going downstairs to make a cup of cocoa", and had then come down and done it normally.

It's just like walking on icy pavements - the more you try to take care, the more you achieve the outcome you're trying to avoid. I see people striding out confidently and I wish I was like them. I can't do it, though. I adopt a mincing, tentative gait, which pretty much guarantees me at least a skid if not a fall, a submission, or even a knockout.

The cocoa was very nice and decidedly soporific. Back in bed, Tallboy was awake as I snuggled in next to him. "What have you been doing down there?" he asked me. I'm not sure he believed me when I said I had tried my best to be quiet...

 

The Effects of Arboreal Deprivation in Late Jurassic Herbivores

Obviously the intelligent, cultured and discerning amongst us are spending every spare minute playing Goldminer. Not the case, however, at Weevil Mansions, where the boys are addicted to another game - Jurassic Park on the PS2. They take turns being in charge, and then when it's not their turn to play any more, they watch the other one play.

To digress for a moment, those of you who are parents or who remember sibling squabbles may have winced at the idea of turn taking on the playstation. Not at all. Quite amazingly, there is very little dispute over whose turn it is on the playstation or the computer, and it's down to the Weevil Regime. I hate to think what the kids would say if you took them into a quiet room and asked them "so, what's she really like?", because the thing is, I rather like Rules.

Before Tallboy and the Steps moved in, the Rule for the Sun was that he put the cooker timer onto 1 hour before starting a computer or playstation session. This meant that he didn't spend all afternoon glued to a screen, but had to get up and go and do something else when his time was up. So when two more children arrived, it worked even better, because anyone wanting to go on anything can check how much longer they have to wait and they know they will get to have a fair go. You've no idea how many arguments and disputes this avoids. A second Rule had to be brought in, which was this - if the timer has not been set by the person currently on the computer/playstation, as a penalty they have to make way immediately for whoever wants to go on (so long as the new person has set the timer in accordance with Rule 1 (b) (iii) [as amended]).

I appreciate that this may seem rather over-regulated for some of you, but it works because it sets boundaries, gives certainty, and applies across the board. It also tends to avoid me having to give judgment in frequent "he said" "she did" "it's not fair" scenarios. It does, however, rather fall down when Tallboy and I are cooking, and therefore using the timer ourselves...

Anyway, back to the boys and their game. The idea is to build a Jurassic Park of your own, entice visitors in and avoid them being eaten, tend to your Dinos and carry out research so that you can hatch some more. It's a serious business, you know. Attempts at humour have been dealt with scathingly. When Methane Boy was playing, the suggestion that it would better be termed "Jurassic Parp" was ignored scornfully, as was the idea of having a version populated entirely with prehistoric pigs. You're ahead of me, aren't you? Yes, Jurassic Pork...

Methane Boy lay on the sofa, controller in hand, sighing. "It's so unrealistic the way they lie down to sleep in the water." Right. You've created a virtual world based on a film based on a work of fiction, you have populated it with virtual creatures which were last present on this planet 65 million years ago, and you find the way they go to sleep unrealistic? The mind boggles...

Then there was the mystery of why two of his carnivores had devoured a jeep full of happy park visitors. A spot of detective work revealed that they were ravenous because he had turned off the cow feeder - an armoured lift arrangement which every so often pops a live cow up from underground, leaving it standing blinking in the sudden sunlight for all of five seconds until its head is bitten off by a savage meat-eater. "The blood effects are good, don't you think?" pipes up the Sun. As a vegetarian who has never witnessed a cow's head being ripped off in real life I feel unqualified to comment.

The biggest conundrum by a long way was why did the Brachiosaurs all slip into comas? Intensive investigation by the Sun showed that it happened because they couldn't see enough trees. Not that they were ill, not that they didn't have enough trees in their enclosure, not that they had the wrong kinds of trees to eat. Just that they couldn't see enough trees. Queer bunch, these vegetarians...