Having a look around my house this morning, I am filled with a sense of calm. The kind of calm you would experience after an extended mental illness that has seen you impersonate chickens, wear colanders as hats, bash your spam repeatedly against walls, imagine that you are Napoleon and finally, to the relief of you, all your family and chums (even the imaginary ones), carted off to the fruit farm. Yeah, the sort of peace bestowed upon a post-committed wingnut, that's it.
For today my house looks like a padded cell - a guise I was most certainly aiming for but isn't likely to get me on the pages of The Sunday Times' Style supplement - not because I am insane in the membrane you understand (just lingering this side of 'nanas I reckon) but because I have been a-baby proofing.
Sorry, it took a while to get to the point there didn't it? It may be because my new high security, padded, squishy squashy sanctuary is a little distracting. It's as if I have taken up residence in Mr Staypuft's anus.
Baby proofing - sounds easy enough doesn't it? In theory it is. You simply take a glance at your hoosey and pick out all the potential dangers to your cheeky chimpy.
However, those of you who have been through such defence armament will know that one glance uncovers that in fact you have been living in an Afghan minefield for the last five years and your lovely little scrumpy bum is only one shuffle away from being maimed / electrocuted / charred / decapitated / blown-up into a mini mushroom cloud.
The more you look, the more you realise it is a miracle that you're still alive and moving house suddenly becomes a very attractive option. For those whose tots are too teeny to worry about turning your homes into cushiony fortresses just yet and have still to experience the horrifying realisation that you live in a abominable sty, let me put it like this:
If your home was featured on Watchdog, Lynn Faulds Wood would be wagging her finger violently and screaming "pooootential diiiith trap!" in your face.
If Cowboy Builders visited, Dom Littlewood's shiny wee face would be screwed up like an angry pug whilst he jabbed his stubby pinkies into your plug sockets and became almost incomprehensibly cockney in disgust.
Worst of all, if your Mum came over and saw the squalor you have been subjecting her beloved grandie to, visualising your buttonhole lying in a pool of petrol whilst chewing on the frayed laptop lead and playing with steak knives, you'd be sent to bed without any tea.
It's this kind of neurosis that has led me to buy every item available on Amazon to protect my midgey widge from my jeopardous armpit of a dwelling and watch YouTube video after YouTube video featuring experienced Sparkies frying themselves with defective plug protectors and the like.
Long suffering Hubble has, this past month, spent every spare minute of his evenings and weekends clamping stair gates to door frames, screwing socket covers to walls, catches to drawers and mopping the dribble from my chin as I rock myself into a jibbering frenzy calculating the lurking hazards in my home (read: slum).
On the odd occasion that I am not incapacitated with terror, I have scaled the lockable pantry shelves and stored every bottle and container dotted with images of skulls and crossbones (note to chemical and pharmaceutical packaging execs: You're really not helping the hysteria with that one), the Grim Reaper or a baby exploding on the top shelf and moved heavy objects that, inexplicably, are like cat nip for smallies, down from sproglet splattering heights and out of harm's way.
So this morning when I bounced down my foam stairs into my lovely padded room I felt better than I have done in weeks. The fact that pickle wickle has decided to get off his lazy toosh and start crawling this week as well as pulling up on the pooch and using her as a walker, means also I feel rather smug and vindicated in my meticulous preparations. My Brown Owl would have been proud. Badge now please.
Who says you can't wrap them up in cotton wool? Methinks the sleepsuit I'm knitting from flame retardant, anti-suffocation, hypo-allergenic, non-toxic bubble-wrap says otherwise. In your face peril. IN. YOUR. FACE!
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