Bank holiday redux

The small boys have been amusing me today. I have had a very busy week without them, skittering around Brussels and London and Paris, to facial scans, cosmetic events, pubs, ripping the legs off sponge horses with my nephew, dinner parties, transvestite clubs, sports bars, bland hotels. Today is a bank holiday in Belgium and it was nice just to bicker and play table football and sit in the sun. Well, not IN the sun obviously following my searing recent experiences, but in the general vicinity of it. As for table football, even Fingers is better than me. Soon I will be excluded from competition altogether. They are terribly French and good at all that spinning and slamming. I just flail around approximately and try to remember which colour players I am supposed to be twiddling. The babyfoot was a post-separation impulse buy, and thoroughly unnecessary, if fun. I was speculating today with my adoptive son on whether it could be my version of etchings if I ever get around to dating. 'Come back and see my table football?'. Might that work? Clearly I have no idea.

In this picture Fingers is demonstrating what he wants me to buy him, which is, apparently, a frite that makes music. Possibly, from the demonstration, a frite kazoo? You may note he appears to be wearing a pager, in the manner of a pint sized drug dealer. It is in fact a Pokémon pedometer, possibly the best invention in the (undistinguished but surprisingly long) history of Pokémon since it got him to the park and back without complaint, counting his steps. He scrupulously transfers it to whatever he is wearing (including pyjamas) and keeps us updated on his step tally. The child has space lizard DNA.

Lashes has more or less given up on speech in favour of the above, though sometimes he will tell me a joke or two. I got a few scraps of information about Gulag Work Camp though, including the fact that owls have a wingspan of approximately 8 metres and that they were woken every morning by Lady Gaga. He seems to have discovered lying, interestingly several years after his cousin, my niece, who is 6 months younger than him.

He remains immutably Belgian in his single-minded love of the bande dessinée.They are both serial offenders on this front. We went to the local book shop - miraculously, blissfully open 365 days a year - to kill a few bank holiday minutes and they just sank into this position, from which I was unable to shift them, despite my British awkwardness about the spoiling of page corners, and being In The Way.

Later we went newt hunting in the park. Lashes, who has extraordinary hunting instincts, caught a newt with his bare hands and my kitchen sieve. I was impressed and relieved at the speed with which the operation was completed, fearing several hours of fruitless and increasingly bad tempered dredging.

I like this picture, not least because they are, briefly, not squabbling, united in triumph by a small spotty aquatic lizard. Thanks, newt!

They probably are squabbling here, but you can't tell. There was heated discussion about the optimum number of tadpoles to take home (Lashes: four, Fingers: three, Emma: none. Go on, guess who won. You might be surprised), only broken up by a small dog falling in the pond.

Funny, maddening, small boys. About half an hour after this, they deliberately flooded the bathroom so dramatically I had to send them both to bed with NO POKEMON.