Mummy Gets Stuck. How Embarassing is that? Talking Rupert Just Sniggered

This has been coming for some time. I’ll tell you, when my brother/sister arrives he/she has a lot to answer for. So, Mummy, Jane McCormack our neighbour and me went to a big shopping place today called Bentley End Shopping City, which is a very, very big place where lots of people go to mill around and make mobile ‘phone calls in the middle of where you want to walk. There are lots of shops there and we went into a big department store there, called Bingle and Crabbe, to buy ‘some things for the baby’. This department store hasn’t been renovated since black and white days and they have this little crankety old lift with kind of mesh doors. Mummy, who to be honest is now approaching the size of a small principality and is likely by the end of the week to be classified as a new planet, tries to get into the lift and gets stuck in the door. Now this may seem to you to be a sad, distressing, even tragic event. Not so! To me it was just plain embarrassing and, I’m sure, the first in a long line of embarrassing moments I shall be having with my parents. Luckily Jane was carrying me at the time; otherwise I’d have been stuck too. People stared, children giggled, old women made sympathetic noises and eventually the manager had to be called, and my pigging Rupert Talking Soft Toy, who I’d brought along out of the goodness of my heart despite that brawl with Paddington a few weeks ago, just sniggered like Mutley the dog all through it. He really is a childish bear! Eventually a woman from the cosmetic counter, wearing more make-up than a carnival clown, eased Mummy free with a handful of expensive hand lotion with no harm to anyone but, what made it even worse, we had to march across the shop with all these people pointing and then … horror of horrors… we were taken up to the baby section in the goods lift with all the boxes of stock and a grinning idiot in overalls who called me ‘sonny’. I shall never live it down. The shame! And what was the culmination, the result, and the pinnacle of this cringe-inducing trip? Two pairs of miniscule cotton bootees and something called a breast pump. I just closed my eyes and dreamed of being on a tropical island with a cup of cranberry juice. Some hope.

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