Boxing clever

It's a red letter day today in our house, not because I still have hair and feel OK although that is a lot better than expected, but because at last the enormous cardboard box full of other cardboard boxes that has been sitting, through snow and rain, in our front garden since Christmas (yes that is two months this week) has been demolished and is in the back of our car waiting for its last ride to the tip.

You will recall that we were away for Christmas having my blobs removed in Dresden but the festivities went on, for some of the family at least, in our house. Luke and Aleks (third son and his wife of only 10 months) are madly in love with Harry and Danny, so far their only nephews on our side. At Christmas this passion expressed itself in the purchase of the most enormous dinosaur seen this side of the Cretaceous period. Joe, second son, after whom the dinosaur was quickly named, was in charge of the house over the festive period. He had attempted to put the box his namesake arrived in outside on cardboard recycling day, filled on my distant instructions with all the other boxes of all the other toys Danny and Harry received. Unfortunately the recycling operatives saw through this cunning plan and either couldn't or wouldn't take it, so there it has sat ever since. It just seemed too big a challenge for us to take on but this morning out I strode with my roll of plastic bags and it was demolished and packed away in a trice.

I hadn't met Joe properly until last week because he had just sat minding his own business in the play room at Jess's house. I sat in there playing with Harry on Pancake day and do you know Joe is utterly charming just like his human counterpart. He has also given me food for thought. You see he responds to you. If you sit in the room with him and start chatting he will turn his head to you and wink his eye. If you actually address him head on he will whirl his head around, flick his tongue and utter sounds, luckily all of the time looking like the benign cuddly end of the triceratops family, if they had one.

I know this is verging on the very weird but perhaps I should contact the manufacturers to sound them out on a new business opportunity, namely Gran/Mom in the Corner. So they make a perfect facsimile of loved, but not very well, family member, programme in a few of their favourite facial expressions and responses to various conversations and off you go. As the loss gets easier or the model dustier you could just wheel it out say on birthdays or at Christmas and finally when you couldn't stand it any longer off it could go to the tip like its box before it. In big families like ours you get multiple sales you see and it would be interesting to see if each ordered a different model, saying and doing different things.

I am not sure about proposing the same thing for husbands and wives as that is bordering on the pornographic and I don't think the manufacturers would be up to the subtleties and psycho drama required in the average relationship. But who knows what the next few years might bring in model technology and if it does happen remember I thought of it first, so there, and why did it take two months to move that ******* box and no thank you I don't want another cup of ******* tea.