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The story of the baby and the rubber johnny

"Nee-ynke nee-ynke". That's the noise my teeth are making as I bite into the steak and kidney pie I bought down the fish and chip shop this evening on my way home from work, as I discover that that juicy lump of kidney is actually a large piece of shapeless tasteless rubbery gristle.

"Nee-ynke nee-ynke" and what the hell do I do with it? I'm certainly not going to swallow it... that's not my style... I have to spit it out... into the newspaper wrapping? I'm not the cultured kind of individual who decants their steak-n-kidney pie and chips onto a plate before settling down in front of the telly. Anyway, unless I'm going to hide that chewy lump of inedible animal down the back of the sofa I'm going to have to sit and look at it next to all that as yet uneaten food until I finish it all and can bundle it up into the rubbish.

"Nee-ynke nee-ynke" is just the sound I guess my one-year-old son heard coming from his little milk teeth as he greeted his Grandad at our front door this morning.

"What's that you've got in your mouth, sonny?" said Grandad as the cute little fellow toddled down the hall towards the front door where Grandad was standing, having just handed my wife the bundle of washing that had spent the previous day drying on their washing line. You come to appreciate help like that when you live in a small flat with no drying facilities. As an expert child carer, Grandad realised he needed to get that dangerous potentially choking obstacle out of the baby's mouth - who knows what they pick up and stick straight in their mouths?

Unfortunately this was not the first time this has happened today. The milkman experienced exactly the same sense of unease earlier this morning as Grandad was now feeling, when he inserted his finger into the toddler's mouth to remove the dangerous potentially choking object and withdrew a heavily chewed rubber johnny, still in it's wrapper.

Let's be specific. It was a purple Jiffy rubber johnny, which toddler had found in the drawer of my bedside table. Without missing a beat, the purple johnny was replaced by the black one the small fellow had concealed in his hand. It's quite a picture seeing how someone copes with the task of having to hand a pair of chewed, dribble covered rubber johnnies to the woman who prior to that moment had every intention of using them (obviously without small holes made by sharp little milk teeth).

And who knows, if things get desperate this Saturday evening and we haven't bought replacements, one of us will almost certainly look up and spot the small pile of chewed but useful looking devices sitting safely on the bookshelf and think "well his teeth probably didn't go all the way through" and develop an argument that is sufficiently convincing to the other party that we will be taking adequate precautions if we use one of the less chewed ones.

I wrote this on Thursday 9th October 1997 and it's one of the first things I ever published on the Internet