Alas poor Gormity.

This is a Gormiti. Or rather, this is THE Gormiti. I hate it with a passion bordering on the psychotic. I would quite happily take a blowtorch to its face and watch as it melted. I'd even sing as it died. Don't tell Smallmad that though! He loves the damn thing.

Gormitis, for the over fives amongst us, are small plastic collectable figurines, like Pokemon or in my day, Star Wars action figures (or so Chaos man tells me - I collected bees in jars, and glow in the dark Ghostbusters stickers out of cereal packets). Gormitis are THE toy du jour and kids love them.

One day I was in the middle of plucking a swan in the kitchen (or something) when a perplexed SM wanders in and says mournfully, "I can't find my Gormiti" I advised him where I thought they might be but soon I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down from my suckling pig or whatever I was making.

"Errrrm, I still can't find my Gormiti". He then proceeds to urgently tell me, with his arms stretched out behind him, that it wasn't just any Gormiti, it was the one "With straight WINGS". I turned the heat down on the peacock I was roasting and went to help him look.

After a good half an hour searching in vain, and with SM getting more and more teary, "STRAIGHT wings remember!" I asked him, "Are you sure you've had it at this house?" He looked at me like I was mad and said, "No, it was at NANNYS house". Graaaaa!

He was inconsolable when I told him we couldn't go to Nanny's to get it as it was too far away, and the Lobster I was bisquing would burn. "Ohhhhhhh STRAIIIIIGHHT WIIINGS!"

Over the next few weeks we'd be walking through the woods and we'd hear, "I think my Gomiti might be under my bed" or sitting down for tea "My Gormiti might be in the shed, can we go and look?". It became known as "THAT BLOODY GORMITI" and when his Nan visited, bearing a small, straight-winged plastic eagle-man we were as happy as SM to see it.

As we were running the boys home, SM suddenly patted his pockets and wailed that he'd not got his GORMITI. Heads in our hands we turned the car around and went to fetch it. Unfortunately, one of the wings had come off during the reunion. Not wanting to crush SM's already bruised spirit I carefully laid it on a bed of soft tissue in a clear plastic box. I took it back out to SM and explained that there had been an accident and the Gormiti was in hospital waiting for an operation. Wide-eyed he listened carefully as I told him to ask his mum to stick it back on with glue when he got home. He solemnly nodded and peered anxiously at his patient.

The journey was a happy one as he spent it making ambulance noises playing Gormiti Hospital and fortunately didn't listen to his macabre older brother cackling "It's DIED! It's in a COFFIN!,Lets BURY it!"

Is it uncharitable of me to say that I hope he's right?