Barnaby Buttercup, a champion of neither anything nor anyone, considered himself a master of pajama-related activities. His latest ambition? Pajama Mud Mayhem! He’d envisioned a glorious mud fight, conducted solely in his finest silk pajamas, naturally. He’d even invited his neighbour, old Mrs. Periwinkle, a woman whose glare could curdle milk, to join.
“Mrs. Periwinkle!” Barnaby called, brandishing a mud-caked watering can. “Ready for some Pajama Mud Mayhem?”
Mrs. Periwinkle peered out from her rose bushes, a trowel clutched in her hand like a weapon. “Pajama…what now?” she squinted, her voice like gravel gargling with vinegar.
“Mud fight! In our pajamas!” Barnaby declared, launching a small mudball which unfortunately landed squarely on her prize-winning petunia.
Mrs. Periwinkle’s face turned an alarming shade of beetroot. “Barnaby Buttercup,” she hissed, advancing with the trowel. “You have just committed an act of horticultural terrorism!”
Barnaby, momentarily forgetting his mud-slinging ambitions, yelped and dodged. He scrambled back, slipping on a particularly slimy patch of mud and landing with a resounding *splat* directly into his own mud-filled birdbath. He emerged, looking less like a pajama-clad warrior and more like a swamp monster who’d lost a fight with a washing machine.
Mrs. Periwinkle, after a moment of stunned silence, burst into laughter. “Oh, Barnaby,” she chuckled, wiping a tear from her eye. “You really are a right tit, aren’t you?” She then proceeded to join him in the birdbath, throwing bucketfuls of mud in gleeful abandon, her own sensible nightgown now sporting a rather fetching mud-splattered design. The Pajama Mud Mayhem, it turned out, was a surprising success. Just not quite in the way Barnaby had imagined.
