Prince Toby has started his own diary for National Novel Writing Month. You can follow his adventures here.
Wednesday 2nd November 2022
Weight: 1317g (lots of toilet activity today!) , cucumber consumption: 4 slices (hurrah!), escape attempts: 5 (from bath), interruption of Very Important Human Tasks For No Reason Whatsoever: 17, interruption of Very Important Human Tasks For Toilet-Related or Other Emergencies: 5
7.17 am: Human No. 1 said my morning routine was rather detailed yesterday and that my adoring public (my words, not hers) might get bored if I took that long to get going every morning. Personally, I think my morning routine is exhilarating, but now I am professional published author on super-successful blog, I have agreed to do some editing. (I am an Editortial Consultant, after all.)
7.35 am: Lamp (bleeeuuaargggh!).
7.42 am: Breakfast (yum!).
7.51 am: Snooze.
9.35 am: PLOP! Bleeeuuaargggh!. Was having nice dream about Dick Van Dyke tapdancing on giant slice of cucumber (not like the stingy super-wafer-thin slices that I get) when awoke to terror of all terrors. BATH DAY!!! Now, I know Human No. 1 warned against going into too much detail about my morning routine, but this bit is absolutely necessary. Who wants to be plonked in a washing-up bowl full of water to nearly drown first thing in the morning? I’M NOT A TURTLE!!! Bath Day is one of the few topics that divides the torts of Twitter. The sensible torts hate it with a passion and tweet handy tips about how to avoid it, but a few strange but magnificent creatures seem to view it as some kind of luxurious spa treatment.
Toby Tort’s Top Tips for Escaping the Bath
1) Pretend you’re drowning.
2) Scrabble up the corner until human lets you out.
3) Stay so still that human fears you have died of overexposure to baths and rushes to your rescue.
4) Wee in your bath.
5) If human is feeling particularly vindictive, they might leave you to sit in your own wee. If so, you may have to resort to doing a ginormous poo.
9.26 am: Pretended I was drowning. Human No. 1 was too busy scrolling through Twitter on her phone to notice.
9.27 am: Scrabbled up the corner. Human still distracted by phone.
9.28 am: Tried staying still but got bored so started scrabbling again.
9.31 am: Already did wee before I got in the bath so looks like I’ll have to bring out the big guns . . .
9.32 am: Escaped from the bath! Hurrah!
9.33 am: Back in the bath. Forgot that you have to time your little accidental carefully. If you let it loose too early then human will just change the water and plonk you back in. Thwarted again!
9.50 am: Escaped from the bath (for real, this time). Sitting under my heat lamp to dry off.
9.53 am: Really need to do something about the bath situation.
9.57 am: Am genius. Have launched Twitter poll to get a definitive answer on how the tort community feels about Bath Day. Confident they will all say it’s dreadful and humans will be forced to stop giving us baths altogether.
9.59 am: Oooh! Two votes already!
10.00 am: Hmmmm. Not quite going to plan. 100% of the torts (two utter maniacs) so far say that Bath Day is better than cucumber. Am 100% confident that one of those torts is Gladys the Magnificent. She LOVES baths!
10.03 am: Perhaps should have stipulated that Gladys wasn’t allowed to vote. But don’t want to be accused on denying women the vote . . . Tricky . . .
10.04 am: In hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have put ‘better than cucumber’ as one of the options. I’m not convinced there is anything better than cucumber . . .
10.06 am: Perhaps I can change all options on the poll to say ‘DREADFUL, AWFUL, BAN IT!’ so guaranteed the correct result, but feel like this is something Donald Trump might do (if he wasn’t banned from Twitter) so fear this might be unethical.
10.10 am: Apparently, someone called Elon Musk (pretty sure that’s a Body Shop fragrance) has just bought Twitter and he’s planning to let Donald Trump back on, so perhaps it’s not unethical . . .
10.13 am: Still no change on the Twitter poll. For some reason, I can’t seem to vote myself, so perhaps I’ll have to get Human No. 1 to vote on my behalf.
10.15 am: Human No. 1 says that voting in my own poll misses the point of the poll. I thought the point was democracy? Feeling disenfranchised.
10.16 am: Plonked myself in my water bowl and covered myself in soil as protest again Bath Day and dreadful Twitter poll injustice.
10.18 am: Hurrah! Two more votes and, this time, from sensible torts (I suspect Albie and Torchy). So it’s now a 50/50 split between the correct answer (DREADFUL, AWFUL, BAN IT!) and the ridiculous joke answer (better than cucumber). If I keep protesting, perhaps I can sway things in my favour.
10.23 am: Did some more poo to punish Human No. 1 for denying me the vote. Feel like suffragette. Don’t think I fancy chaining myself to any railings though so will just march up and down my pen instead.
10.25 am: Human No. 1 has removed my water bowl until I ‘start behaving responsibly’. Huh! Wish Human No. 2 was in charge today. (He’s ‘gone into the office’, whatever that means.) If he was here, he’d be ignoring me right about now and I could get up to whatever mischief I liked without any pesky interruptions or repercussions.
10.44 am: Human No. 1 threatened to put me in the bath again if I got any more dirty so have stopped parading for a bit.
10.46 am: Ooooh! Seven votes on my poll now! Someone has voted for ‘I have to be in the mood’. Wonder if that’s Gatsby . . .
10.47 am: Must stop checking poll every five seconds. Need a distraction.
10.48 am: I’ll just have another quick look . . .
11.16 am: Aaaaarggh! Nine votes now! And the cucumber is winning. DISASTER!!!
11.19 am: Think I’ll have a snooze. Everything always seems better after a snooze.
1.20 pm: Just had terrible nightmare about being chained to a giant washing-up bowl full of water in manner of Paul Daniels magic trick. Fortunately, woke up before I had to perform daring escape in manner of Debbie McGee. (I’m not sure the old toilet tip would work in this scenario.)
1.22 pm: The cucumber has arrived. Hurrah! Sometimes it pays to rampage. Human No. 1 clearly worried that I’m too distraught about Bath Day, Twitter poll and disenfranchisement to eat.
1.23 pm: I’m not. The cucumber was lovely!! Mmmmmmm!
1.24 pm: Just checked the Twitter poll and finally the right answer is winning. Hurrah! Let’s ban Bath Day! Perhaps I can close the poll early . . .
1.43 pm: Reading the British Chelonia Group September/October Newsletter. (Pretty sure this was addressed to me but my humans never deliver my post on time. Some of the pages were folded over so clearly they had already read it. Rude!)
2.00 pm: Thrilling article about Clyde the Sulcata tortoise who escaped from his pen, got hit by a train and just carried on walking down the train tracks. What a legend! I’ve made a few escapes in my time, but I’ve never made it as far as Clyde. Once I managed to hide from the humans for an entire day and night, but I got bored eventually and they caught me chomping my way through next-door’s dandelions. Clearly I’m going about it the wrong way. Next time, I might try catching a train instead. Or get hit by one and become huge social media star (although I’m pretty big on Twitter already).
2.24 pm: Aaaaaarggh! Two-headed tortoise alert! His name is Janus, he’s twenty five and he’s the oldest two-headed tortoise in the world! (I’m still reading the newsletter, just in case you were worried he’d broken into my Tortoise Parlour.)
2.26 pm: Two heads . . . Imagine what I could do if I had two heads . . .
Toby Tort’s Top Ten Things to Do with Two Heads
1) Eat twice as much cucumber.
2) Bite Human No. 1 and Human No. 2 at the same time!!!
3) Double Tongue Out Tuesday!
4) Double withholding of Tongue Out Tuesday pictures from Human No. 1.
5) Get two votes in my Very Important Bath Day Twitter Poll (because I would have two brains and therefore be two tortoises).
6) Double sleep!
7) Double dreams! (Hopefully not about performing death-defying magic tricks in giant washing-up bowls – although, come to think of it, second head might come in handy for that too.)
8) Have a dramatic fight with myself.
9) Perform epic duet ‘Confrontation’ from Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical.
10) Write two diaries at once (or just write this one twice as quickly).
2.53 pm: Imagine there could be a few problems though. For example, what if second head thought that Bath Day was better than cucumber?! The horror!
3.15 pm: Time to pretend I’m starving again in order to secure more cucumber.
3.30 pm: Exhausted after all that chomping. Think I’ll have another snooze . . .
5.17 pm: Human No. 1 woke me up boiling the kettle again. She really does have the most dreadful caffeine addition. Probably why she insists on poking me in the middle of the night.
5.18 pm: 39 minutes left on the Twitter poll. 16 votes and it looks like we’re banning Bath Day!
6.02 pm: It’s official. BATH DAY IS BANNED! Hurrah! Well done to the 56% of sensible torts out there. Gladys won’t be pleased . . .
6.05 pm: Having some lettuce to celebrate.
7.08 pm: Gladys is fuming. Or threatening to fumigate us dirty torts. One or the other.
7.09 pm: Am supposed to be sleeping but too excited about Bath Day Ban!
7.10 pm: Pretty sure I won’t be able to sleep at all toni—
(Editortial note from Human No. 1: Toby is fine. He just fell asleep halfway through his sentence, bless him).
9.17 pm: Actually, Human No. 1, it’s called a cliffhanger. Speaking of which, you may just find yourself on the receiving end of one of my cliffhangers if you if poke me again tonight . . .
You can follow Prince Toby on Twitter @PrinceTobyTort
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