Rain, rain go away

I've been yearning for glamour today... You know, Bette Davis, paint that lipstick, red carpet type of stuff.

Kent Town in the rain is pretty dismal. In fact I didn't even have to go out to experience this, I just thought, Kent Town will be miserable. Don't go there. It'll be full of twelve year-old mothers and their babes smothered in coverlets with the legend 'Champ' in gold letters above the frills, and skinny dads with fags and no shirt on, even in the rain... Let's me and Anna-mouse create our own world today, I thought.

So we did. Anna-mouse beat me by miles on the invention stakes. First of all she took Baby Doll and Dolly for a walk in the double buggy, rocked them to sleep and changed them ("Smelly poo, Mummy!"). Then she managed a picnic with Squidgy Teddy, Noddy and Mr Pirate in which they consumed boiled eggs, several plates of cake and drank copious cups of tea. This while I emptied the dishwasher and sang 'You're Sensational' to myself as Grace Kelly.

Then we sang Happy Birthday to everyone we knew. No, I mean everyone... but the good thing was, this took some time... Then we - or rather I - had to call everyone we had sung Happy Birthday to on the Thomas the Tank Engine mobile. And there were no two ways about it. Conversations had to be had.

"Mummy! Call Bemjum! Call Bemjum, Mummy!" barks Anna-mouse, in her I-am-going-to-be-running-the-country-really-quite-soon voice.

Mummy takes said mobile and invents jolly chat with Benjamin, one of Anna-mouse's cohorts.

When list of everyone is finally exhausted Anna-mouse guides us seamlessly onto another level of play.

"Mummy, call Mummy!" the order runs.

And thus ensues a surreal conversation between me and... well, me listened to with enormous satisfaction by small daughter drunk on despotic power.