I will never starve. .

 

I will never starve. I have biscuits, dried fruit and/ or teething rusks in all of my pockets - in all of my jackets and even some of my looser fitting cargos. They are protected (albeit not hygienically) by wads of balled up tissues in various states of freshness.

Trying to resume a life involving just a few things outside the toddler rodeo circuit, I decided to take She-Who-Worships-Pink with me to an author reading.

Well actually, I didn’t so much decide, I had planned to go alone; however She-Who-Worships-Pink is a bit sick and can’t go to day-care. A noble sentiment perhaps but one obviously not favoured by the parent who sent their sick child to day-care the previous week infecting mine and many others in turn.

The author is Emma Jane, author of Attack of The Fifty Foot Hormones, and I worship the paper she writes on, keyboard she types on, the screen her text resides upon? Anyway I know her and love her and she’s an inspiration to my writing, so I decided to go anyway.  This is despite the fact that She-Who-Worships-Pink also just had her chicken pox vaccination and was not in a particularly generous or forgiving frame of mind.

(Ominous music plays)

Problem number one – the event and therefore the seating is at the top of a staircase.

Problem number two, is Number Two’s.  Just as the author is being introduced there is a sudden overwhelming and awful smell and She-Who-Worships-Pink becomes uncharacteristically hyperactive for a sick listless child. With a sinking feeling I realise it’s ‘the poo dance’ and my little performer looks like a rapper on speed as she staggers around the gathering wafting  her scent in everyone’s’ general direction.

As the traditional poo-performance finally ends, the first thing that piques her interest is a mighty fine staircase - actually plural that. She finds another one behind the lectern as well.

As if on cue, my phone rings. I didn’t get a minute to turn it to silent. So I am madly punching buttons trying to shut the thing up, (why won’t phones switch off when you really need them to?) still in a half crouch, chasing a cranky toddler between two staircases. At which stage, the author, my hero, and her audience seem to have become MY audience.

Finally after moving my chaos-road-show down the stairs till the crises had passed, I returned to find the book reading was over.

I was however in time to catch a woman moving through the group proffering a tray of biscuits. My auto-pilot took two and eagerly stuffed them into my shirt pockets.

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