Now Bring Me That Horizon!

Mrs Next Door came over, hair ruffled and looking generally harrassed.
"Imogen," she said, smiling winningly and depositing a handful of blueberry muffin shapes on the kitchen worktop, "please can you babysit for me this weekend?"
"Yeah, ok. When this weekend?"
"Um.. All of it?"

Turns out, she's taking her two younger kids to visit their father and forgot to make arrangements for her other kid, the oldest who has a different daddy.

"Right no problem then. Hows R taking it?"
"He's.. a little upset, but he'll be fine."

At that I dropped a glass, but she's used to my clumsiness and thought nothing of it. Not that she seemed to think there was anything for me to be riled abut anyway.

So I went to visit, after having been councelled by my Alec flatmate to say nothing negative about her lack of parental responsibility to R, who is terribly cute. I timed my visit, giving her half an hour to make her way to the station so I wouldn't have to chat then swanned over. She walked out, I walked in, and R threw himself at my neck crying.
I used to cry when my mother went away even overnight, but I'm sure he'll get over it when he realises it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to her.

R is one of those rare children with a body clock reasonably similar to my own- I like to get up mid afternoon and go to bed mid morning (I've seen the sun rise every morning for the last two weeks as I was dropping off, it's lovely if you factor out the bloody singing birds), and R, in turn, likes to stay up late. So we sat up til just after midnight eating rubbish, playing on my dancemat, singing and watching tv (he doesn't approve of wossname on BB with the boob job, but he knew what I was talking about when I thoughtlessly mentioned the Comedy Food Diet, and thought it was hysterical), and then I sent him off to bed as I realised my hold, already somewhat tenuous, on my language and insinuations was slipping rapidly.

I curled up on the couch and fell asleep to the soothing tones of MTV2, when I was woken by a little figure trying to curl up next to me.
"Sorry Imogen," he said through tears. "I had a nightmare."
"It's ok sweetie," I said giving him a cuddle. "Let's dream about something else now though; what shall we dream of? Pick something nice."

"Porridge?"