more money than...

'You do realise those bananas are $15 a kilo?' asked the assistant at the supermarket checkout.

I did.

But I wondered why she didn't think to ask me about my knowledge of the price of the lamb steak ($25.99)

or the organic fresh orange juice ($5.99 for 2 litres)

or the the weird novelty 'taste bomb' tomatoes ($2.99 a punnet and precisely the same price as the ordinary cherry tomatoes so not an extravagance)

or even the organic sweet potato crips I'd bought in desperation after scouring the shelves for the only acceptable brand of grain chips (I don't know)?

I happen to like bananas.

I was only buying three.

I swore I'd never be a 'don't kids say the darnedest things? blogger' but...

This morning, a conversation about who would be taking her to daycare took an unexpected turn.

'Mummy's taking you because I'm sick.'

'Are you going to die?'

'No, not yet. I'm just a bit sick.'

'But but but you said that you and Mummy are old and when your uncle died you said that he was old and sick and you're sick and when are you and Mummy going to die?

'Don't worry,' I said, 'We won't die till you're a big grown-up.'

'But but but (tears) I don't want you to die!!'

More tears, some sobbing.

'I want someone to love me!!!'

'Oh' I thought 'Don't we all?'

You've got at least a bit to answer for, Christos

So on Wednesday evening, after a long, tiring day and a 30-minute rush hour train trip to a place she didn't want to go, during which trip we had to stand the whole time to be near her stroller because not one of the apparently able-bodied* people had offered us a seat in the limited mobility section near the door, and two avuncular men had encouraged her in boisterousness by asking her name and where she was going and laughing when she jumped, my three-year-old was upset when I accidentally pressed the call button for the lift from the platform (despite knowing that that was her job, what was I thinking? tryng to get out of the crowded train station as quickly as possible maybe?), I told her she could press the button inside the lift instead.

I didn't really expect that a passenger from our carriage would deliberately press the button first then tell my outraged child that she needed a smack for complaining.

At least she didn't administer the smack herself.


* I know some people have difficulty with stairs and don't necessarily have any visible clues of this so I'd never actually ask anyone to move but there is a subset of train passengers who take up the limited mobility seating because they're too lazy to move further into the carriage. Such people annoy me. I vaguely recall a time when I didn't have to travel with a stroller and I could sit in any part of the train I wanted. I always went further into the carriage, not least because there were never any small children there.

Not quite a New York story

I had to fill in a form so last night I dug out my daughter's birth certificate for the first time in three years.

I realised it wasn't entirely accurate.

According to it, I lived at one address and her father lived somewhere else rather than our actual state of cohabitation. I mean we were both listed in the same block of units but whoever had typed the form mistook an 8 for a 3 so one of us had a false address in an entirely fictitious level of the building.

I wondered if that anonymous data entry person had speculated about why two people havinga child chose to live so close to each other and yet not together.

Did they think about how we met? Was it a romance begun in the car park or the lift lobby? Did we find each other on the train? Or we were like the erstwhile couple Mia Farrow and Woody Allen who deliberately had separate apartments they could look at each other across Central Park? Not that that turned out to be such a great way to raise a family....

But then I wondered whether, if we had the same surname, their quality control might have realised it was just bad handwriting rather than an unlikely coincidence.

Must work out how to get it fixed now.