interlude

Morning at the chateau.
"What do you think of me turning eighty?" enquires the Mammy from behind a cup of tea.
She is talking to her poet son who is eating a sanger at the kitchen table.
A Robin Red Breast is perched on a chair at one end of the room, expectantly waiting for crumbs.
A Paddy White Breast has his snout on the poet's knee, hoping for some sanger but perfectly willing to settle for a piece of Robin.
"What do you mean?" asks the poet of his mother.
She eyes him keenly.
"You know what I mean. Any thoughts on the big day? Any tributes you want to make?"
The mighty Heelers ponders briefly.
"Dearest Mother," he says with great tenderness, "you are the womb that bore me. And to be honest there are times when you bore me still."
The Mammy responds with the very first malediction of her eighty first year, and adds something convoluted along the lines of always suspecting I wasn't hers at all, but had somehow been substituted with another baby at the maternity hospital by Free Masonic nurses in league with satan.
Well, gentle readers, it's the best theory we've had so far.