The World According To Britney (not her real name)

Britney (Not her real name) has just done something amazing.

When your child does something to make you proud, it matters not how dark the day is, because your heart fills with sunshine. And I am proud. I feel the same as I did when she wrote her name for the first time. It was like the day we were on the school run and there was a flock of seagulls swirling over a field. I asked her why the seagulls were there and not crapping all over the inhabitants of Berwick upon Tweed as normal and she replied it was because the tractor in the field was ploughing and the seagull vermin were after the worms. I was chuffed to a jelly that she knew that. Anyway, the amazing thing that Britney has just done has NEVER happened before in all of her 8 years.

She has just asked me to turn the television off.

Honestly, she did.

Britney, who thinks it is law that the television is on for 24 hours a day has just asked me to turn it off, as she couldn’t concentrate on her game with her dolls house.

As described in the post about our lawn mower collection, we are lucky to have a large garden; which Britney ventures into when we bribe her with sweets.

For her 3^rd birthday she received a beautiful wooden playhouse. It was on stilts and had 2 windows, a stable door and a little ladder leading up to the tiny veranda at the front. Granny Weatherwax made cute little curtains for the windows and we laid carpet on the floor. It was so lovely that I was severely temped to close the curtains and sit in it drinking gin. However, as Britney grew, she complained that she couldn’t quite stand up inside it and had to duck her head to get in the door. The playhouse had been well used and therefore (with her permission) one day while she was at school, we loaded it onto a trailer and waved it off to its new home.

It was 5 weeks later when she noticed that it had gone and that was only because we’d had high winds the night before and she assumed that it had blown away.

Britney would be happy to sit and watch the gogglebox until her eyes became square, so it’s a surprise that she does like to slap on her plastic colander and get out on her bike. In fact my brother The Sniper and his wife The Verruca Expert, called on their bikes a few weeks ago and Britney went off for a pedal with them. When The Sniper delivered Britney home again with her bike in the back of his jeep he did remark that his “f**king ears were bleeding” which I took as a sign that Britney had not stopped talking for the duration of their bike ride. Apparently at one point in an attempt to keep his sanity, The Sniper had suggested that if she closed her mouth the flies wouldn’t get in to it; to no avail.

Britney does seem to have a tendency to chatter incessantly. When she was younger and still sat in the back of the car, sometimes I would have to turn the radio up to drown the constant stream of one-sided conversation.

A little while ago, I started keeping a note of some of her more taxing questions and I thought I would share them with you, because we’re mates. If you can answer any of them, then please do let me know because not even sodding Google can assist me in giving her a reply.

1. If I get hot, which bit of me gets hot first?

2. If an apple fell into some wet cement, what would happen to the apple?

3. What’s cleverer, a wolf or a lion?

4. Can you kill a zombie if it’s already dead?

5. What would happen if the world got bigger?

6. Is a Doctor allowed to run in a hospital?

7. If you eat too much will you die?

8. Why do we get itchy?

9. What would you do if you were allergic to dogs but needed a Guide Dog?

10. Why don’t cats eat slugs?

11. How do you do Guided Reading by yourself?

12. If you’re blind, how do you go shopping?

I think this gives you a rather good insight as to how Britney’s fast revolving brain works, although I’m not sure I quite understand it myself.

She has made a swearbox that sits on the coffee table in the lounge. I asked her if in return, I could make a “I am sick of picking things up” box, where Britney has to put 10p into it, everytime I have to pick one of her possessions up from the floor. Her reply was “I like Monty Don because he doesn’t swear”.

Which I have to admit, I don’t fully understand either.