Anarchy, Sunday Style

Tired of the withering looks across the breakfast table, I've been out to Coles this morning to buy an industrial box of wild bird seed with which I can continue to entertain my feathered friends. I've laid some out on an old plastic plate of Ella's so now it's her turn to sulk about the cockatoos getting a better deal (I thought she might not have noticed but she spotted it right away. She has eyes like a hawk).

Darren has been on call from home all weekend, which is handy in that he doesn't have to get up early and go out to work, but he does have to be within an hour of base should the bat phone go off, which means if we want to go out anywhere we have to take two cars.

It made no sense for us to take two cars to the supermarket so I went on my own with Ella while Darren sat at home in his tracky bottoms waiting for the inevitable bat call, though he's not living up to my ideal of a superhero because when they eventually rang him on our landline, it took him so long to get off his bum and answer the phone that by the time he did they'd given up and the phone went dead.

In the event they had to send somebody else, though just as he thought he was off the hook they called back with an emergency transfer from outback NSW, a lone GP trying to cope with a very sick patient, so he's gone off to Mascot to board the plane and bring the patient into Sydney.

So while he was lounging about at home, Ella and I were pushing a wonky trolley through the aisles in Coles at Maroubra, and feeling slovenly I'd even gone out in my Ugg boots, which is the down-under equivalent of nipping to Tesco in pink fluffy mules (the aussies wear Uggs as slippers, which is why they were secretly sneering at us wearing them outside when they suddenly became fasionable).

Anyway, having persuaded me she was going to be a good girl, Ella acted like a hooligan all through the shop, picking up glass jars, biting into baby egg plants and crawling underneath one of those little sandwich board-type yellow signs that says "Caution - Wet Floor", which was fine until she wanted to get out of it and found she was stuck, though the sight of her crawling around the floor like a tortoise with a yellow shell made every passer-by except me laugh out loud.

So now I'm here in the flat on a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing but a squashy tube of cookie dough standing between me and complete anarchy. Already the living room looks like a scene from Shaun of the Dead. While Ella's asleep I'm off to do some internet shopping for a tasteful storage unit I can buy to avoid a similar scene in our house back home. I might have relaxed my standards a bit but I still don't like clutter.

Pass the gin.