A grimace was the reply.

Grumpy and I had to go to a funeral last week. He rang me in the morning to check I was picking him up. Then he spent some time panicking over whether he'd fit into his suit or not. He and his new girlfriend spend a lot of time at home watching the telly and eating chocolate. Quite frankly, the Grumpy one has really piled it on.

Despite, or perhaps because of, my ex-husband's somewhat stretched outfit, it was a lovely funeral. Grumpy hitched his too-tight pants up, surveyed the rather ancien nature of the crowd and muttered to me, "Jeez, I reckon they must all be wondering who's next."

Afterwards he convinced me to stop at his place for a while so I could cuddly Finny* and we could chat for a bit. The Finny part was lovely, but the chatting wore pretty thin in a hurry. I was going to the movies with Heidi later that evening and I wanted to get in a gruelling stair climb before I went.

"I've gotta go," I said.

Grumpy was standing at the kitchen bench shovelling chocolate into his gob.

"Sure you don't wanna hang around?"

"Can't. I'm going out and I want to do a stair climb first."

He looked at me with an expression somewhat akin to irritation. "You're turning into an exercise obsessive," he said. "You wanna watch that."

I regarded him for a moment, as impassively as I could. I looked at the flake of chocolate melting into an irremovable blob on his silk tie. (I didn't mention it.) "So," I asked, "how's that suit working out for you?"



*For those not following along on Twitter, Pounce has been missing for several weeks now. We are sad.