A dumb sort of drought

Last night I felt a deep sense of foreboding as I tucked my baby in. She looked up at me with big innocent eyes and sucked contentedly on her dummy. Her very last dummy.

I woke to the horrible blood-curdling screams of a dummy-less baby at the bleak hour of not-enough-past-five. My baby is an expert in vaporizing dummies, so I considered running away. But that seemed like an awful lot of effort.

Somehow a thriving herd of approximately nine thousand dummies has completely vanished from this flat. I am starting to suspect an international gang of dummy thieves.

A baby's dummy is her castle. 

A dummy-addicted child has a worse oral fixation than a 40 a day smoker. A dummy-addicted child will morph into Cthulhu and bite your leg off if she doesn't get her fix. Which is why I had no choice but to deploy what is known by medical professionals as 'pediatric methadone', or 'lollies'. Luckily we had a stash of strawberry ones on hand.

We ran out of lollies by 8am. In spite of a torrential morning downpour of cats, frogs and other biblical creatures, we had to make a run to the store. To date, we have already spent our family savings on replacement dummies. We are currently negotiating a dummy mortgage with the bank, to replace the lost herd of nine thousand.

Unfortunately there is a lot of speculative tit interest at the moment, and dummy prices are quite high. As is becoming customary in Britain today, the bank has demanded our firstborn as a down payment.

The reason I suspect an evil gang of teet thieves is this: how else could nine thousand dummies could go missing from one London home? Your typical London dwelling is an old house that was subdivided into thirty flats and a pile of money, leaving each flat with approximately three square feet of living space.

In spite of what an estate agent might say to you in a moment of deceptive speciousness, you can hardly fit nine thousand dummies into that kind of habitat, let alone lose them there.

I would phone the police regarding my suspicions, but I worry that they would just refer a recording of the matter to News Corp, who is rumored to be already quite over capacity on such matters. Anyway a doubt crept into my mind today when we returned from the shop with four precious new dummies to tide us over until the dummy mortgage comes through sometime mañana.

While contentedly slurping on one, Ali made a bee-line for the rubbish bin. Then she stopped in her tracks when noticed me watching her. She casually pretended to be checking out some shiny object in the kitchen cupboard.

Ali has previously proved herself to be a bin-enthusiast. So I've had a new idea: maybe my bank can sell me a dummy insurance policy. Perhaps in exchange they will only ask to borrow my firstborn.