All is clear.

One or two people have asked how my Grandson Mark came up with the wombat-shit line in his poem “Death” in the “Little Laureates” post. Well I asked him yesterday and he said that he had been watching a wildlife program in which a vet was treating a wombat, for what I do not know. Anyway the wombat shit on the floor of the vets office and the vet complained saying “Chriky mate” (I assume he was Australian) that smells like a dead horse”. I looked at him “So the Wombat wasn’t dead, the horse was dead”. He nodded and rolled his eyes.

I asked him where he got the word excrement from, he said his teacher wouldn’t let him use the word shit, he changed it to poo, she wouldn’t let him use that either, she said he could use a laxative word. I couldn’t wait for this one; He looked at me as though I were a moron when I asked what a laxative word was. “It’s a language the Romans used in the olden days”. Mark slapped his forehead as if to say “at last the old farts got it”.

Marky finished his explanation, smiled and shook his head; there was obviously no hope for me. The Wombat thing, death by proxy I suppose. He carried on making his Birds instant whip satisfied that he had put me right, I carried on being perplexed.