stomach bug

Me Mol and Liz were on a jaunty country walk with my mum and her dog, about this time last week. Walking gayly through the village allotments admiring the beans and bulging beetroot and marigolds and rhubarb and feeling a bit envious that my garden in London is incapable of even bearing me a geranium let alone a Jerusalem Artichoke... when suddenly Mol started to choke and cough and wretch.

The noise of someone wretching is enough to make anyone wretch too. Even if you don't know the reason behind the wretching, its that hhhhhhhhhhhhhuh noise - so strong you can feel your stomach muscles clamping and your Bran Flakes on the verge of being regurgitated.

So Me Liz Mum and the Dog tried our best to ignore this dreadful noise pollution by walking on, talking loudly above the sound of air being gasped for and stomach-contents-imminent-evacuation. Although at the back of my mind, because I am after-all a responsible mother, I was thinking, hmmm, this doesn't sound too promising, I wonder why my daughter is gasping so loudly and revoltingly, I wonder if in fact she needs my help?

Eventually, after about an hour of this awful noise, Mol hadn't actually been sick but was still walking along sounding like a parrot with a pair of bellows stuck down its throat, I figured I ought to pull my finger out (of my ear) and try to solve the problem of the choking rather than ignore it.

So with nostrils shut like a camel, lest Mol vomit and the puke-fumes spark off a chain reaction in me, I made awkward loving movements to my eldest precious daughter to find out what the problem was.

At the same time, for some reason unknown to us, other than total fluky coincidence, Liz started to hum a familiar tune that we have on one of our really old nursery rhyme tapes in the car saved for traffic emergencies (these also have the effect of making people want to vomit).
"...I don't know why she swallowed..." hummed Liz;

"...yak yak yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak... I swallowed a fly..." yakked Mol.

Ah!
There was a young lady who swallowed a fly.

We all started to laugh and Mol was most upset by our unsympathetic reaction, so I gave her a hearty pat on the back and started singing with Liz - "...she swallowed a cow to catch the dog to catch the cat to catch the bird to catch the spider that wriggled and jiggled inside her..."

I was sympathetic enough to not sing the last verse where the (stupid) old lady swallows a horse, and now she's dead, of course! Because I thought that would push the boundaries of sympathy towards that of mocking, and that's really not nice.

Mol yakked like the old winded parrot all the way home, and I gave her a jelly baby to wash away the remnants of fly - which had probably just had lunch on a cow pat before it unfortunately flew down Mols windpipe.