Forbidden fruit (From Hereford Times)

Forbidden fruit

10:12am Wednesday 9th July 2008

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I went off to have supper with my mum last night, and so handed over Freya’s bath/bed-time duties to Joe. When I left the house, Joe was excitedly poring over a pile of cookery books and concocting a gourmet meal for one, and Freya was busy chatting to some snails in the garden and trying to feed them sand.

I arrived home at about 10pm, and went into the kitchen, where Joe was despondently tucking into beans on toast. He looked sheepish, and frazzled, and said in very nervous and hushed tones, that it wasn’t the smoothest bath/bed-time he had ever done – and that in fact it was ‘a bit of an ordeal’.

Apparently, Freya had taken a fistful of snails and red berries into the bath with her. Being the neurotic woman that I am, I have forbidden Freya from playing with these berries, for fear of them being poisonous, and both Joe and Freya know THE RULES. Anyway, after much wrestling, Joe thought he had managed to get every piece of incriminating evidence from Freya - until he caught her quickly popping a rogue berry, which, he argues ‘must have been hidden in the folds of her hand’ into her mouth. Joe then tried to show Freya authority and asked that she remove it from her mouth immediately and hand it over. And with that, Freya did a very elaborate cartoon swallow (just to labour the point that she rules), and then smirked triumphantly at Joe.

Not knowing for certain whether these berries were poisonous (although he was 99.9% sure they weren’t), and more importantly, not wanting to endure my wrath when I would inevitably find the berry in Freya’s poo the following morning, Joe panicked. He scooped a somewhat surprised Freya out of the bath, and charged downstairs to phone our landlord. “Freya was having her bath and swallowed a red berry from that tree in our garden – is it poisonous?” Joe yelled down the phone at the landlord’s 13 year old son. Hysterical laughter on the other end of the phone ensued. In fact, he could hear the whole family laughing in the background. “Oh dear, is your good lady wife out this evening Joe” the landlord finally managed. The landlord then assured Joe that the berries were not poisonous, that in fact they were probably quite nutritious, and then enquired as to what Freya was doing with the berries in her bath. Joe was holding a dripping wet, squealing-with-laughter, Freya, who was gleefully hitting him over the head with a plastic octopus, and so he abruptly thanked the landlord, put the phone down and rushed Freya back up to her now-lukewarm bath.

However, it seems that Freya had grown tired of these shenanigans and once she was plonked back in the bath she completely lost the plot. After angrily throwing a jug of water, a flannel and the octopus at Joe, she then tried to precariously climb out, whilst demanding that he hand over the little pile of berries that he had left on the side. Being a bit of a soft touch, and wanting a peaceful life, he handed them over on the understanding that she play with them for 5 minutes before bed, and not eat them.

Joe and Freya then spent the next few hours locked in a battle of the berries, and when I returned home, Freya had only just gone to sleep. And as a consequence, Joe was eating beans on toast, instead of the elaborate salmon concoction that he had planned. He wasn’t consoled by the fact that I had had a very relaxing evening with my mum.

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