Doc Barbara and the V.I.P event

The date had been fixed for the first V.I.P.  (Vertebrates and Invertebrates Party) event on the next Thursday when Bob Twaddle would be back from Lithuania (the movement towards  Lithuania is rather like the drift to Dover in King Lear - but less sad) . He had been looking for a new species of snail which he intended to call Helix Twaddlata but had found none in the desert where he had overturned every stone, large or small.

Just ten more pebbles to go and then I can fly home. 

Meanwhile Doc Barbara noticed that Darwin, her dog, was looking wistful and, when pressed, he blushingly confessed that he envied Worm One's sparkly bobble hat, wanted one like it - and begged her to make it for him.

Maybe make the bobble a tad bigger?

Doc Barbara explained that she didn't have a pattern for a worm hat but the wily hound was ahead on that excuse. He had seen her knitting a tea cosy and pleaded that one similar to that would be perfect. From puppyhood, he has had one ear larger than the other: the more robust one could be slotted into the handle aperture whilst the smaller, puny one slid into the spout hole. That way he, too, would be cosy, he said, like the tea (that's a very good joke for Darwin. Please laugh). She promised that she'd try but it could not be done by Thursday. Dear Reader, you and he will just have to wait. (Note the sophisticated authorial intrusion there

The party began peacefully with a discussion about soil.

Mine is finer than yours but we won't argue.

The snails favoured coco-coir substrate but the worms preferred a fine tilth. There were no other strong opinions and the topic moved on to teeth. Bob Twaddle said that his were all fine except that one of his canines had grown so large that it had to be filed down to half its original size. Darwin was so terrified by this that he ran whimpering to Doc Barbara who patted him absent-mindedly, decoded the misunderstanding and wished she could perceive the difference in sound between tilth and teeth with her NHS hearing aids. She twiddled them ineffectively and wondered if she should be twaddling them instead. Which had the audiologist advised? Should she buy an ear trumpet? 

Yet even she noticed that the atmosphere was growing alarmingly contentious when an uppity snail called Berowne claimed that he had 14,000 of them (teeth not tilth) on his tongue and that it had a scientific term, a radula. Worm One challenged him, Berowne stuck it out and the scene grew ugly.

So there!

Darwin prodded Doc Barbara with his paw and she drew the party to a close, announcing that there would be entertainment next time in lieu of discussion. She had no idea what that might be but would ask Bob and his sister, Belinda, for ideas. (Belinda was at a council meeting in West Wales at Mynachlog-ddu where they had decided to debate in Latin so as to avoid pronouncing the name of their village). 

"I must pour oil on troubled birds of a feather," Doc Barbara explained to Darwin as he snuggled under his fish-themed blanket to day-dream of his new ultra-sparkly hat and forget about canines being filed down to half their normal size.