simplicity

We went to DFS at the weekend. Our old sofa was beginning to decompose and we happened to receive a personal invitation to a DFS ‘pre-sale party’ through the door. The invitation waxed lyrical about the spectacular party; champagne on arrival, double discounts throughout the store, live entertainment…

As we hadn’t been to a party since December 31st we decided to make an appearance but as we parked the car I desperately hoped we hadn’t made an error of judgement in getting dressed up.

We walked up to the front door just in time to see the DFS Sale sign on the pavement get knocked over by an obese lady with poor spatial awareness. This set the tone for the remainder of the party:

· The warm champagne (in Styrofoam cups) was being served by the same person who was single-handedly tackling all customer enquiries and answering the phone
· The double discounts applied to six of the seventy sofas on display, all of which were grossly overpriced to start with, or just plain gross
· Finally, the live entertainment was a clown, whose repertoire was limited to juggling three balls and falling over his own shoes.

It was about as sensational as fish fingers.

Which is fine, as long as you’re 6 years old or ever so slightly simple.

If I’m honest, I’m worried that my 7 month old daughter might be a bit on the simple side. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s just that last night during her bed-time story she started laughing every time we turned the page. There was nothing theatrical about the page turning and there were no accompanying sound effects. It wasn’t a good book (who writes a children’s story about bees?) and even the pictures were lacklustre. But there she was hur-hurring away to herself at something which ranks about as funny as a nosebleed.

So in a bit of a panic this morning I reached for the yellow pages (the internet connection was down) and started searching for a child development helpline, only to find that I was so accustomed to using Google for just about everything that I didn’t actually know how to find information from a book any more. I considered calling 118, but resent the idea of being charged considerable sums of money to slowly spell the word ‘development’ to a Geordie on the other end of the line:

Geordie: Got Your Numbah!
Me: Child development helpline please.
Geordie: “What’s that man? Child De-what?
Me: Child Development helpline.
Geordie: Um…ahhh…ah canney find it man…Spell it f’rus like
Me: D-E-V…
Geordie: Slow down like...

Money well spent.

I knew it didn’t really classify as an emergency so I refrained from calling 999 and tried NHS Direct instead. To cut a long story short, they asked me a series of unrelated, randomly selected questions for 8 minutes and then finally asked when the baby was due and if I needed an ambulance. At this point I hung up and assumed the person on the other end of the phone was on drugs or ever so slightly simple…

My Tesco shop got delivered last night, and for some unknown reason they substituted my usual tube of Aquafresh with a tube of ‘Houndsfresh’ chicken flavoured toothpaste for dogs. As we had run right out of the mint variety I was forced to take the plunge before leaving for work this morning and go with the Houndsfresh.

Once you get over the initial taste and texture (which I can only liken to a foamy chicken mousse) it really wasn’t that bad. That being said I haven’t actually spoken to any of my colleagues whilst standing any closer than 1 metre away from them yet, so I guess the jury’s still out for now.