The next day, following a very pleasant afternoon with DMC and the kids, a Pyrex bowl that had been returned to me minutes earlier by one of the other mums fell out of my handbag approx 30cm to the floor, and smashed. On carpet. Despite the bowl being about half an inch thick all over. Mystified, I banished the Axis to their room and cleaned it up. Didn't realise Pyrex could smash like that.
This morning, the last of the melamine bowls Daddio and I bought together fell clean out of the cupboard and split neatly in two when I was making the Pie's breakfast. Again, I am mystified. Since when does melamine smash on impact? 'Ooooooh,' said Pie. 'I reckon that's a sign.' He nods portentously, then barges into the living room to thump his brother over the head for watching Pokemon without him. Cue carnage - sofa demolition, hurling of medium-sized objects, issuing of threats, nothing unusual. However, I am left to mull over his comment about it being 'a sign'. I have long had signs myself, and the odd prophetic dream - predicting pregnancies, the return of old friends out of the blue, not much, and not often, but there, nonetheless. I recently sensed that a friend of a friend would be present at a 30th birthday party, despite the fact that he was most definitely in Beiing. I don't know him well, so there would be no reason for me to think this at all - and no-one else knew he was coming, so there was huge surprise when he walked in - but I tell you, I knew.
Unfortunately, I thought I was being a bit mental, and so didn't tell anyone. When I did reveal that I had, in fact, had second sight of the wanderer's cameo, I was roundly disbelieved. 'Bollocks,' said the Welshman, before bursting out laughing at my protestations and proceeding to indulge in a slightly Orwellian anecdote about his mum working in a garden centre. I scowled at him and made a mental note to burn his toast and accidentally stuff rooibos in his teapot in the morning (no, that's not a euphemism, even if it does make a pretty good one). The Birthday Boy made an attempt to take me seriously, before cracking up himself and repeatedly asking me what number he was thinking of (69, obviously).
My powers of prophesy are clearly pretty rubbish, however. They don't seem to be able to predict that Pie will lose two teeth in a week, thus necessitating a double visit from the Tooth Fairy (who, last time, left a narky note with the pound coin attached, reading 'NOAH. Be kind to your mum and your little brother. TF') and a desperate search for change behind the sofas just before bedtime. They couldn't predict that I would lose three bowls in a week, two of which definitely should not have smashed owing to their supposed supertough properties. And they couldn't predict that Kong would remove one of the sets of bolts from the right hand side of the toilet seat, chuck it in the pan, and flush it down the toilet, thus blocking the bog as well as rendering said seat extremely hazardous to the Pie the next morning, who slid off it, luge-style, midway through his morning ablutions.
They could, however, very accurately predict the shade of blue that the air turned that day as a result of my language. Kong's days of destruction are numbered. As, now, are my plates.
