The littler of my big sistren is in town this week; so's her offsprung, who is a small person with a limb at each corner and a prodigiously expressive range of vocalisations, including "er bleugh" ("Would you be so kind as to pass the cheese, please?"), "tsa tsa" ("Why, hello, fine quadruped; yes, you with the long ears"), "errr" ("Fancy that! A bookshelf! Ripe for the unstacking!") "omblong" (untranslatable), and "eee" ("Take note: my ontological angst will attain unplumbable nadirs if you fail to acknowledge my presence forthwith"). She also waves, this offsprung, and smiles, and sits on indoor plants, liberates fridges of their fridge magnets, warms the cockles of complete strangers on trams, and laughs uproariously at cow impersonations.
To celebrate the presence of two of my favourite people, I've been doing really fun things with them. Like today I took them to the Thornbury vegetable emporium, and showed them the enormous eggplant. And then I let my sister make alphabet soup on my stovetop. And then we watched the train going by - on the Epping line, no less. Ah, the simple pleasures. Melbourne: city of fun.
6 comments:
Did you solve that great mystery of life: how do the makers of Alphabet Soup do the dots on the lower case 'i's'?
Wow! That really is a mystery, 'though nicely circumvented in this case by use of capital letters.
I don't suppose you saw what font the alphabet soup was in? Gothic font alphabet soup would be rather grand to eat, but I imagine they'd charge extra for all the curlicues and bars (only available in very posh restaurants.) Possibly courier font alphabet soup? But that would be rather like ingesting a newspaper.
'Unplumpable nadirs' sounds rather like a kind of elf or pixie that lives in the drain pipes.
I envy the variety of your niece's vocal repertoire- not for myself, since I have evidently progressed quite far past the 'er bleaugh' stage (at least into 'er bleaugh please'), but by proxy for the four-year-old specimen I currently reside with in London.
She is a genuinely lovely creature and is terribly reassuring in this time of everybody-is-going-to-be-blown-up-imminently hysteria, because it's hard to think about shrapnel when there's a Small Blonde Thing climbing you enthusiastically. However, her breadth of communication stretches from screams to louder screams to even louder screams, and, for the sake of breaking monotony, the occasional torture of the family cat.
Also, if I ever give birth to a girl, I may call her Nadir and excuse it as a misspelling of Nadia, which is much less interesting.
(As I'm currently deprived of my blog by technical malfunctions, I am taking out my excess loquacity on you. Excuse the barrage.)
Nadir! Lovely! I've been hoping for a few years now for a sprog called "Rubella", but have since entertained the possibility of "Laundrette". The whole parthenogenesis thing is harder than I thought, though.
This morning my niece exclaimed "ergh oo oo", which obviously means "I love you". I was very touched.
Hope you're keeping safe in that there England, Jennifer. Remember to carry a handkerchief and a safety pin at all times, in case of emergency.
Definitely sans serif, Tim, and bold, and slightly tomato flavoured.
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