Fluffy Bat, my security bat who is definitely a real bat rather than a Mothercare-brand cellular cotton cot blanket, has got rather filthy after months of soothing me in bed; it is time for a wash. This means I will not be embarrassed by how dirty he is when I take him on holiday at the end of the week.

We'll be going to the Basque country for our holiday, the North-East corner of Spain. This is a great place for eating and we have booked every meal in advance so we are sure of being able to go to the best places. We've been before and it is a real laugh. I must wear my floweriest shirts.

I am pouting petulantly and being generally awkward today, or at least for the next five hours. Butter the lovely teddy bear is having a bath, and it'll be five hours until he is clean and dry. I want Butter now! I suppose I will have to make do with Fluffy Bat until he is ready.

I've had an email from a friend who will be at the Adult Baby Club this weekend. Much nicer when there are people there one can speak to.

My ear infection has left me with an ear filled with dried-out wax; I cannot hear a thing through it. The way of dealing with this is to soften the wax with olive oil which allows it to drain out. Since I sleep on Fluffy Bat (my security bat, who is a real bat, not a Mothercare-brand cellular cotton cot blanket) it seems likely that the wax and oil mixture will drain out onto him. Poor Fluffy Bat, I don't want him to get oily and filthy. I hope Butter doesn't catch any of the filth.

... The champagne for tonight.

As you can see, Fluffy Bat has made a rare trip out of bed in order to soothe me in the difficult task of handling a magnum of fizz. It is Gratien 1996, by the way. It is lovely, I've had it before.

It is clear that either someone out there knows me (and my security bat), or they came along to a site they might find rather surprising. One of the many searches that has brought people here to the spume of drivel this month was for the words "Fluffy Bat". Pleasingly, I am second on Yahoo and third on Google for this most soothing of search terms. I just hope they realised that he is a real bat and not a blanket. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people top me in the search for "Butter" including a site called butterisbest; I couldn't agree more. The Wisconsin milk marketing board can be thanked for this statement of the obvious. I do worry in that a lot of their recipes they talk about Butter (proper noun) whereas all of their other ingredients are just nouns; I hope they are not suggesting cooking with Butter (the teddy bear). This could just be an example of American Headline Syndrome, though, the usage of initial capital letters Where They Do Not Belong.

I managed that most wonderful of things, an afternoon nap, today and picked up an affliction in the process. Fluffy Bat, the real bat certainly not a Mothercare-brand cellular cotton cot blanket, generally rests on my pillow under my head. He has a rather textured, almost cellular, structure and so after forty-five minutes of sleeping and not moving whilst resting upon him I was left with imprints on my face. This is called 'Fluffy Bat face'. I admit, it is hardly a serious affliction, but at least it is an anecdote. He is a real bat, just to confirm, not a blanket.

Butter has been with me for but nine months; given my toddler-like sense of object-permanence it seems like I've always had him. Obviously, as he is my main security object he has spent a lot of time with me: toddlers are not known for being sparkling-clean individuals so he has attracted a bit of grime in places. I would not dream of putting Butter is the washing-machine, he is too big and would never dry out. A non-drying security object has caused much heartache in the past. As a consequence, I decided to look for ways of cleaning soft toys (plush toys/animals for those of a more American vocabulary) and was pleased to find quite a comprehensive guide very rapidly. It sounds quite involved to me, and I may just have to let Butter continue to accumulate the residue of affection before I try anything so dramatic as scrubbing him with alcohol. I can see comedy value in having Butter stink like a distillery, though.

Fluffy Bat (ah, my first-ever security object, returned after years of being apart, and he is a real Fluffy Bat, not a sheet) is perfectly happy to have a bath in the washing machine, as he is quite a flat bat he dries with no problems and can soon be dragged to bed for hiding under-purposes. As you can see from this old picture, Fluffy Bat cleans up a treat with all drool marks removed after a sojourn in the washing machine. Takes some time after the bath to smell as soothing as he did before the bath, of course....

As I have mentioned in the past, I am off to a Lemon Jelly concert. It is happening tonight. As you are probably unaware, Lemon Jelly produced a rather jolly ditty called 'Nice weather for ducks'; I feel this leaves me little option but to wear this to the concert:

You may note I am picking up Fluffy Bat with a reasonable degree of enthusiasm. This is not because I dropped him, but rather because he jumped out of my hands. Clearly, toddlers would never dream of carelessly discarding their security objects, unless they get distracted, but sometimes when it is pointed out that they appear to have been thoughtlessly cast-aside it must be explained that it was the teddy bear/blanket/bat's own fault they are on the floor. This may be because we toddlers do not wish to appear ungrateful for the hard work our security objects put in, or it may be because animals leaping around is just completely hilarious. This can be demonstrated by a very short clip from a popular British comedy program of the 1970s, The Goodies. I am told it is a .wmv file for reasons of space rather than to exclude people with minority operating systems.