Mary Dunwich writes: I am quite seriously cheesed off. There are three main reasons for my discontent. First, I am still feeling poorly thanks to the bug I caught at the "Parents' Whinge" meeting. Charlie calls it "24 hour flu", but I've had it for nearly three days now, and "the three-day sniffles" doesn't sound very impressive. I'm all right as long as stay on the sofa and don't attempt anything more strenuous than making a pot of tea and watching "Young Dracula". Second, I have lost my new and feature-packed mobile phone. Well, I didn't lose it. My son gave it to a seventeenth-century Dutch sailor with bad teeth and scurvy and a taste for heritage tobacco and rum. I don't suppose he'll have any more success in working out how to use it than I did. I really miss that phone. Admittedly, I never managed to make a call on it, but that's not the point. It was a crucial weapon in my battle to chat up Harry the Geek. Harry is tall, dark, fiercely intelligent, and smoulderingly gorgeous. He is also remarkably bashful in the presence of women. He will speak to me only in the company of some gadget or gizmo that he can hold and fiddle with and generally stay within his comfort zone of the technologically complex. I like to hand him a gadget and say something like, "I still can't get it to work as a USB storage device, Harry!" Then I can lose myself in those deep, dark eyes while he talks about technical things I don't understand and don't really care about. Talking about bits and bytes calms and soothes Harry the way a well-made martini relaxes James Bond.
Poor Harry is ill at ease with himself and with other people. He lives in fear that he may be forced to engage in the baffling world of "small talk" and "social intercourse" and all his pychological shortcomings will be put on display. If only he realised, with his looks he doesn't have to say a word. He can just smile and perhaps raise an eyebrow slightly, and any red-blooded woman within smiting distance will fall straight into his arms. Who needs conversation?
Ahem. Well, anyway. As I was saying... The third reason for my state of disgruntlement is that blooming great bird my son brought back from his latest foray into English History. I don't know what he intends to do with it. I've googled and googled, but I can't even find out how to look after it. Wikipedia was surprisingly reticent on the subject of dodo husbandry. Maybe I shall, in time, write them an article on the subject myself.
My husband, to his credit, took the news that his son had brought a dodo home with very good grace. After initial panic, we decided that the bird (hereafter to be known as Dodgson) should probably be kept warm. Mauritius is warm, isn't it? Geography is not our strong subject. Charlie has constructed a hasty dodo-coop in the workshop, and rigged up a little heater in there to keep Dodgson cozy. We also decided to feed Dodgson fruit, porridge and cornflakes, at least until we could get better advice on diet. Some people keep pigeons, don't they? Dodgson looks rather like a big pigeon. If we could get advice from a pigeon-fancier we could perhaps just multiply up the quantities a bit.
I hope we don't get into trouble with the Council, as we are forbidden to keep chickens in our area. It may be that a dodo would come under the rules for keeping pigeons or even geese. I've asked Charlie to check the Council's rules for poultry-keeping.
