Sadhbh invents a lot of words, and recently we& #39;ve been joined by a creature called a “seekum" and I am not happy about it.

The name has troubled me since the beginning, and it gets no less troubling when you hear it two hundred times a day. We see seekums in the garden, she tells stories about seekums in trees, caves.

One day, on the nappy table in the morning, Sadhbh says ‘We’ve got to watch out for that seekum.’ Later she murmurs: ‘A seekum is coming. A seekum is coming.’

It’s difficult to wrangle a clear description out of a toddler, but sometimes the seekum is red, sometimes it’s black. It has a lot of hair. Legs *and* arms. It has three eyes. Three ears. It’s very big.

She looks over my shoulder as we enter the kitchen. ‘A seekum is there,’ she whispers in my ear. Later she asks me to draw a seekum and, at a loss, I draw a vague circle (‘Like this?’), which she begins to fill deliberately with rough little scratches. ‘A seekum. It’s a seekum.’