Every Saturday, Bennie helps his dad on the market stall. Bennie is a young budgie. He is, in his own opinion, VERY GOOD AT IT.

He shouts the prices. He stacks the boxes smallest on top. He tells everyone in the queue that they have chosen well, and they have, so nobody argues.

He is nine centimetres tall and he shouts like a bus, and by the time the market went quiet he had four coins on his money-band. Four. Earned. His.

Bennie: “Dad. DAD. Count them.”
Bennie's Dad: “In a minute. You did the whole queue on your own. That was the hard bit.”

Bennie's Dad has one saying and he has never once got through a Saturday without it. You will hear it twice. Here is the first.

Budgies always budget.

And then Bennie turned round, and that was the end of the peace and quiet, because on the stall opposite there was a bird bath shaped like a ROCKET.

A bird bath. Shaped like a rocket. With fins, and a little ladder up one side that no bird has ever once needed. Three coins.

Bennie: “THREE COINS. Dad, it is a rocket and it HOLDS WATER.”

Every feather on the back of Bennie's neck stood straight up. That is what Bennie's do. Yours might do something completely different. Mine play a small fanfare, which is excellent at a market and dreadful in a library.

Bennie's Dad wandered over. He did not look at the rocket. He looked at the money-band and counted out loud, slowly, the way dads count. Then he said it again, because of course he did.

Budgies always budget.

Bennie's Dad: “Give every coin a job first. Then see what is left.”
Bennie: “A bath IS a job. Feathers have to be CLEAN, Dad. It is basically work.”

He has just reclassified a rocket as work. You cannot argue with that. I have tried. It is airtight, it is completely wrong, and he thought of it in under a second.

So Bennie put his four coins in a row on the counter. One. Two. Three. Four. Little and round and warm from his own pocket.

One of them already had a job. The seed bag on the way home. That coin has had that job since he was more or less an egg.

Bennie: “And the other three?”

Across the way, the rocket sat there doing absolutely nothing, extremely well.

Four coins. Four jobs, because that is Dad's rule. One rocket with a ladder up the side.

I am not going to tell you how Bennie sorted it out. He has got a grown-up standing right there. So have you. Off you go.

Tap. Tap. Pause.