we were away

At Venus Bay with Michael, Laurie and Nicola and the elephant in the room, Michael and Nicola's second but as yet unborn (otherwise I would not call it an elephant - I once made my niece Alice cry by calling her one, but it was only in reference to her good memory - since this neicephew is unborn it can't get me) child. A number of walks but not quite enough to satisfy my current fad-passion for walking all over and everywhere. Venus Bay is a bad bay, as it is not a bay, just a strip of coastline as far as I can tell, and the town of VB is on an isthmus or perhaps just a peninsula, with Anderson Inlet on one side and the ocean on the other. It is pretty developed, on the whole. There are kangaroos (saw tons of those - not that timid), wombats (we saw a wombat but it wasn't very well), literally tonnes of birds. One bird in particular - a rufous whistler if I remember right - was regularly attacking its own reflection in the windows and when I got there in fact I said to Michael, why do you have a towel wrapped round your rear vision mirror? That is, on his car. Well, the RW was attacking its reflection in the mirror. We didn't do anything about our rv mirrors and by yesterday morning the station wagon had big streaks of rufous whistler shit down both car doors, but whether it was shit from being enraged and deranged from its reflection or just from the rw hanging out there a lot and admiring itself I don't know at all.

The little monologue from Laurie about rock 'n' roll is genuine. If I may spoil it (sorry Laurie, I could be wrong) I suspect it was just an example of how he picks things up. Someone used the term 'rock 'n' roll' - I'm not sure of the context - and then Laurie heard it and his ears pricked up. And he really did just say 'Rock 'n' roll? Someone dreamt rock 'n' roll'. But he was using it like it was a person's name, and I guess it does delightfully roll off the tongue like that. The sick-in-the-toilet bit was from a book he had got for Christmas, about a boy who ate books.

Laurie is (stop press!) still delightful, though he denies being a sweetie. (Quote: 'No I'm not'). He turns 3 next week.