Mutie

After a late night at Caroline’s full of giggling and gossip, neither of us are up early and by the time we’ve breakfasted and giggled and gossiped some more, it’s late morning before we arrive at Cribbs Causeway.

Having eventually found a free disabled parking space, we walk through WHSmiths, have a quick look at Currys (hurrah the all-in-one printer-scanner that Caroline bought for £59 in Staples yesterday, is £139 here!) and then a third shop catches my eye.

I drag Caroline in – “you have to see what I was going to get you for your birthday”.

Well it only takes a minute to decide that a bonus birthday/“thank you for having me as a house guest” present is in order.

Much giggling later we leave the shop with a large box and bag and have to head back to the car, to drop off our purchases.

I observe that it doesn’t bode well, if three shops and 30 minutes in to our excursion, we’re already having to unload purchases…

The rest of the day is similarly wonderful – shopping with Caroline is much, much fun.

And we hardly bought anything.

Honest.

I mean there were some shoes in the place that we didn’t even try on…

Many hours later we eventually leave (I’m not saying we shopped until we dropped, but the light was starting to wane by the time we exited the mall…).

The scores on the doors were:

1iz: one pair of luuurvely black boots, one pair of sensible black work shoes (mucho dull), couple of lipsticks, four books (two of which are for my mum) and a present for a friend.

Caroline: one luuurvely stripey knitted hoodie from Next (really excellent bright pink and red – yes really, no dark muted colours in sight, not like either of us really eh?), a couple of lipsticks (no really), a couple of small presents and a couple of items taken back to M&S. Plus the wonderful woman treated me to lunch, which culminated with the biggest crepe I have ever seen.

So not bad really, as I went to order the completing part of the set of items Caroline and Sally have chosen from a certain wedding list, we discovered the line has been discontinued and the internet orders already placed by the other two won’t be filled. However, in a rather poor piece of customer services, John Lewis will just tell the Bride and Groom, not you it seems. The fact that you have paid for a specified item and they don’t tell you that you can’t actually have it, all seems a little bizarre, but at least we found out and have all three cancelled and reselected.

Anyway…

You’re wondering aren’t you?

What was in the box?

Well we made it ourselves.

We chose the skin.

We stuffed it, selected a heart, gave it a voice (recorded out the back in the stock room amid much giggling) and brought it to life.

So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the fold, born on the 6th Septenber 2006, Mutie the Mutant Giraffe.





Why a mutant? Well as you all no doubt know, giraffes are remarkable in the animal kingdom for being the only creatures that are entirely mute. This one however has been trained to speak. Special. Mutant.

But more than that, Mutie is a very talented giraffe.

Safety conscious…he first puts on his knee pads.



Next the helmet.



Then he steps onto his boards.



And lo and behold we have the world’s first skateboarding giraffe.



He follows C wherever she goes...squeeze his tummy and he'll tell you why...

This is what happens when two normally mature professionals, take the day off work, eat pain au chocolat for breakfast and go shopping still high on the sugar rush.

As for even knowing about the Build-a-Bear Workshops, I blame a certain favoured niece…