Dinner Time Banter

The conversation had taken a turn for the worse. What had started off talking about the Queen’s birthday had somehow plummeted into parachuting and flying poos.

I tuned out to the toilet-humoured banter around the dinner table and tried to rewind the conversation to find out how it had got to this point. And then realised it was my fault.

“Did you know it’s a holiday this weekend,” I had asked the children. “Because it’s actually the Queen’s birthday so everyone gets a holiday to celebrate.

“I bet Grandma is happy about that,” quipped Master Seven. Their great-grandma has long been a big fan of Elizabeth and is constantly being told she resembles the queen, much to her delight.

“I bet the Queen gets a lot of presents,” remarked Master Four.

“Maybe we should take her one on an aeroplane?” suggested Miss Four.

“But then we might have to go to the toilet,” Master Four.

“Aeroplanes have toilets,” I told him. Then out of curiosity to hear how far their imaginations could stretch, and probably where I went wrong, I asked: “What do you think happens when you flush it?”

Three frowns then: “All the poos and wees fall from the sky.”

“No, aeroplanes have tanks which are emptied when it lands,” I explained and should have left it there. Instead, I couldn’t resist recounting a story I’d read in the paper years earlier.

“But did you know that one time there was a leak and, remember the other day when I explained to you how hail was formed as it fell through the air? Well that happened and someone found a frozen poo in their backyard.”

This, of course, had the expected response so I continued.

“The people who found it couldn’t figure out where it came from and thought it must have been from an alien until they solved the mystery.”

By now their imaginations were working overtime and they took turns at narrating their own experiences of aeroplanes and frozen faeces until Master Seven topped the lot by relating the time he’d parachuted out of an aeroplane when the frozen poo went flying past and landed on his brother’s head, of course.

And that brought me back to the present. I’m not sure what Elizabeth, or grandma for that matter, would have to say about all that nonsense.