Trying to be a calmer chameleon

Had 3 blueberries and a grape for breakfast as I was far too busy waiting to go round to Bens' house today. Bud says I wear the same range of clothes as Baby Edward ie the 2-3 year range, I say eating's for losers, every minute wasted eating is a minute I could be hopping and hooting and jabbering.

Ben was still asleep when we got there on the stroke of 8.
In between playing with all his Star Wars toys and picking at food we went to 3 different parks and saw a film. Greater coverage of this event on Bens' blog. The film "Hop" was about a giant rabbit king and if you touched his throne it made you into a rabbit and the guards shot people with anaesthetic darts. But there was a new swingpark near the cinema (Port Solent not Gunwharf) and we cleared the plain of fuzzywuzzies using a ship-mounted Gatling gun. In the afternoon we went down to normal swingpark with Erin and the JoniBobs and I had to tell on them a lot for throwing woodchips at Bobert and kicking him in the head with shoes on.
In the end Bud picked me up just when Ben was on the toilet so couldn't come to the rescue.

When we got back, Bud abandoned me totally in front of the TV (tough life) and hid in my room building the new cupboard of 3 levels. As is the way with Ikea products, there were 16 bits of randomly sized wood with holes, a massive bag of screws and pegs and no instructions. This is a deliberate company policy so that by the time you have assembled, unscrewed and re-created the shelving unit in 17 of 163 million different combinations, you know it inside out and are at one with it on a holistic astral zen-plane of recycled Estonian forest.

So he had to build my shelf (challenge Anneka at this point) using only the small picture by the barcode on the box itself.

Bud was extremely insistent that I did not come in the room to help, even though I can dance, quarkle and empty the bag of screws down the back of my bed all at the same time. In the end: the strict policy of non-interference worked!

For those of you that have noticed he's built a mirror image of the object in question: he was working in a mirror universe at the time. And you can just turn it round.

My life is so boring, can I have another one? - Tom Gunnel, Editor of Molten Gun Magazine, Mount Glen.

SAS: black bag ops for the under 6s

For bath fizzer night I selected the Magical Mystery Tour (Beatles) and a smaller fizzer leaving the dragons' egg and the ice cream fizzers for next week. Buds' program during supper was the Antiques Roadshow in which a couple of serious chaps showed off a suspiciously large medal collection from some specialist army unit in Hereford. So during bathtime he set me the following attack scenario to solve.

 Dinosaur = your army of 1,000 men including artillery.
Pink seal = 6 special tough thinking soldiers.

Green duck and penguin = guards atop the very very tall walls of the castle.

Frog = king.
Objective: kill king with minimal loss of life on your side.

So for a while there we laughed and laughed and I bombarded the castle with my artillery for a bit but only pinged a few bricks off because of the very very tall and thick walls.

Then I started having better ideas (well, better than the one about dressing the army up as dinosaurs, anyway) such as:

1. Dress up in the guards uniforms so they don't know you're attacking them
2. Arrive while the guards are on coffee break
3. Hide in the Tesco delivery lorry/dress up as laundry operatives and blag your way in the back door
4. Dig a tunnel under the walls to put a bomb in

So together with some of his ideas (parachute in quietly in the middle of the night and use quiet knives not loud guns) I reckon we did away with that pesky frog king!

Bath time took an hour and a half: we had to play the Magical Mystery Tour twice and I got wrinkly fingers.

=================================

Jof wants to remodel my room and she is jealous of storage units used by both Ben and Erin so this afternoon we drove to Ikea in Southampton. I think everyone else had the same Ikea idea because we spent nearly an hour in the traffic jam waiting to get in: Jof got a bit stressed so we got out and walked to save time and met Bud in the canteen.

Ĩ håd fîsh ånd chîps bůt thë fîsh wås cövërëd în rîce crîspîës (nǿt nîcë) ånd Ĩ dîdn't fåncy åny ǿf Büds' Swëdîsh mëåtbålls. Thën thëy dümpëd më în thë frëë kîd důmpîng årëa ånd böůght më a shëlvîng ůnît ånd böökcåsë.

Jof hit a woman with the trolley: she went flying and caused a right royal rumpus, things always happen to Jof. Anyway it was really busy and Bud and I had a great time pushing the flatpacked trolley round the flatpacked store listening to flatpacked music and flatpacked announcements coming out of the flatpacked tannoys. Bud bought some snore which is stringy candy and the whole place was full of words that looked a bit like english but not quite.

 As we left, we waved goodbye to the cruise ship Balmoral as it left for Norway, probably for even worse weather than we've been having.

Jof did not enjoy the overall shopping experience so next time we will shop online.

Nothing says "We're going" like a ticket in your hand

These tickets will enable us to sail on into the park via the executive channel, Pops can have the complimentary neck massage while I get plied with champers in the first class lounge.
Nipped into town to buy bath fizzers for Ben's sleepover. He can have the pink one with the rose petals in.

In the afternoon Jof deserved a nap so without any encouragement I specifically chose to go and make sandcastles on the nudist beach.

Normally on a Sunday in late May, given good weather, there might be many interesting sights, as I have previously seen for myself: in fact last year I joined them.

However today was cold and windy so apart from a couple of heavily coated dogwalkers and 2 lonely Hungarian fishermen, we had the place to ourselves. The sand was not the right sort to make castles, it just collapsed when you took the bucket off so once I'd actually broken the bucket in frustration, that was pretty well it for castles and we went off to build a dam on the waterfall, one of my all-time favourite activities. Bud collected large rocks and tidal debris and I plugged the gaps with gravel using my spade.

Then we moved further down the coast until the coast ran out. The last bit of Pompey is an old sewage outflow pipe now used by fishermen.

This is where we met the two lonely Hungarian fisherfolk who cast and reeled in repeatedly but only really succeeded in moving seaweed from one place to another. I may have slipped up on the very seaweedy concrete pontoon thing: green trouserbottoms. Then we returned to inspect our handiwork at the waterfall, it was a race against the incoming tide and a large dog that was using it as a swimming pool.

I've done so much work with the 2½ hour investiga-thon I think tonight's supper should be Horse à la carte.

The parable of the number rocks

Last week I took my green security blanket into school for my show'n'tell item. It was made for me by Nanna when I was born and I have resisted all attempts to ditch it ever since. I get most het up when it goes for laundry because it's out of my sight. Bud says only babies have green blankets, but that's patently untrue, because I have one, right? Silly old poo.
Number rocks

A many years ago, Paul and Marie (2 of their old university chums: Paul is a Londoner who once had to sell his hairdryer to raise the fare back from Amsterdam, Marie is a French girl whose Dad has a moustache wider than him; both are now teachers in Cheltenham) came down to Portsmouth to visit the old stomping grounds. During the obligatory walk on the seafront to throw stones into the sea, Paul found one with numbers in. This was slightly unusual so we kept it in the fishtank.

During my short time on this earth I have myself found a couple of these mysterious rocks and last year we found the motherlode, or at least the place they most like to gather. So obviously we filled our pockets and now use them in plant pots.

They are clearly man-made, we suspect they're clay, created in a school art room, stamped with a serial number, fired and cast into the sea to be retrieved later, demonstrating wave action in moving stones along the beach. Most are boring ovoids (made by compressing between 2 hands) but some have artwork, pencil holes, names, pictures of the rising sun and similar. However, like thousands of other inhabitants of Portsmouth no doubt, we have put the kybosh on the experiment by stealing them and using them for fishtanks and plant pots. The best examples are in the cacti pots, the rest I keep outside.

On our normal bottlebank walk, I took my gun that shoots real bullets (rubbery cylinders with a suction cup) and shot Bud successfully right in the park. He retaliated by hiring a pleasant young lady to cut my hair: she said I was so good I could choose a lollipop which I dropped on the pavement immediately.Then it was Gymnastics time. I'm improving, today it was forward rolls, squats and jumping, none of which he witnessed as he went for a 45 minute run. He did get tickets for Ben and I to go and play in the foampit during half-term week so that's good. 

 But afterwards we visited the swingpark right outside the Mountbatten Centre and tried out each of the red obstacles that litter the grassy area. 

Later Pops came round and invited me to tea so we played lego and after much dithering dragged Bud down the park and I shot him again. I showed off my new prowess on the pole and even had another go on the hanging basket (twice in one lifetime?).

Bud went down the pub with the PuddleDaddies to watch the red people being beaten so Jof took BathFizzer Night, I made a huge potion including the lavender bath salts I was supposed to be saving for Ben.

Down the Pan troglodytes

Friday is here again, signalling the beginning of yet another half term in my helter-skelter schedule of time off, lazy days and downtime. Upon returning home I set to with lego, sausages and blueberries. I have been entered into the Polite book for the second time this week, this time was for actually being polite as opposed to clearing up a mess. Erin won the Best Pupil in class award but I've already been that.

Life is just a game we play

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Today my tallest follower Martin is 46. I didn't know ages went up that high, apart from Grandad who is twenty-hundred.  Football day today! It rained heavily on our way back from school so we weren't sure whether footy would be on but the lumpy rainclouds moved on and we were fine. We did all the usual stuff with the addition of the louder-than-life Louie who is fast outstaying his welcome. At one point we had to be ghosts, the reason escapes me but we all woo'd and stumped around like zombie sleepwalkers, then we pretended to be ghosts. At one point it did rain hard enough for us to put on coats but it didn't stop us.
Today I got in the Polite book at school for staying behind during playtime and clearing up the roleplay area. This means my name will be read out on Fab Friday and everyone can be proud of me and my selfless actions.
*Don Quixote. Legendary character. Pronounced Don Key-ho-tay. So in this case, Don Key-ho-tel. Tell me you knew that.

Try to set the world on fire (Mr Mojo Risin')

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 Wednesday park was its usual riot. The swingpark area was full of sun, sons and daughters which included Zak, Zena (10 next week) and Rosie (had to go home after being bitten by a girl).
The JoniBobs brought Louie with them and Ben brought attitude. After we'd argued about whose food we'd eaten we smuggled foodstuffs and drink away and snuck off to the planting tree where we gathered out of sight (or so we thought).
In this weeks' planting session we planted red capsicum pepper (visible here) and mini-cheddars by chewing them up and spitting them out onto the ground, followed by juice in similar fashion. Sadly all our work went to waste, for after getting told off lots, we moved away and the whole lot was cleared by seagulls.

For only the third time ever (although Ben reckoned it was the twenth) we got on the hanging basket and had a right old go, although Bobert doesn't like it going too fast. In the end we relinquished it to some pudgy teens that were loitering.

By home time Johnny had accumulated 3 days of TV ban for spitting food, shirt removal and abusive behaviour towards the umpire (Mum).

Donald! Where are your trousers?

Last week I got into the class golden book again for conspicuous bravery in the PE lesson or similar: I found new and interesting ways to traverse the obstacle course without touching the floor. You know where this ability comes from....my 'Tunnels' training course with Bud. "...you hang onto this birch sapling while I go round...I'll hold onto the lightning conductor, you climb up me...mind that loose brickwork...can you reach that girder without falling off the bridge...I'll stick you in through the guardhouse window, you open the gate from inside..."

When he picked me up from school Bud said hurry up because we were going somewhere as a surprise. I get extremely tearful if people don't immediately tell me the surprise so he devised a game called 20 questions for me to deduce the answer, where each question had to have a yes or no answer.

This did not exactly go to plan (here is a selection of my questions)

20 Questions!!
Is it Tunnelpark?	NO
Is it JoniBobs house or Bens' house?	X
How long will it take us to get there?	X
Is it Paultons park?	NO
Is it Wednesday?	NO
This is a hard game, isn't it?	NO
How many people will be there?	X
Do we have to go on the bus or the train?	X
When are we going?	X
When I've run out of questions, will you tell me the answer?	YES

so we just hopped on my bike and cycled to Landport Adventure playground which I reckon should be our Wednesday park meeting venue for special occasions.

The sign-in log showed I was sharing it with 72 other kids of various heights but it wasn't crowded. 

Only 1 wore the livery of my school: a lot of people were Polish.
We instantly did a climbing tour of all the old favourites but within the first minute I had fallen off something and gashed my back open. Lipsalve cured this straight away and we discovered you can traverse practically the whole park (including new constructions with slightly too many broken ropes) without touching the ground, although you do want to because of the great slides including the giant bumpy one that goes BOOM if you're heavy enough.
I wasn't.

Dressing up was all the rage and the last I saw, a stewardess from Iranian national airlines was marrying a bespectacled boy in a flowing white dress with pink stetson, the ceremony being witnessed by many princesses, air traffic controllers and boys in garish drag who sang happy birthday and god save the queen for the happy couple. The head yellowjacket says it's an OFSTED requirement to have a dressing-up box, perhaps to prepare us innocent kiddies for the nightmare of transsexuality and gender confusion that we will apparently be faced by in our adult lives.

Then I rediscovered the sandpit. We know it's deep because we dug down miles when I was 2 but today it had additional water features on many levels: a squirtling tap delivers water into one vast round steel bucket: this dribbles into a second, lower one and this flows into a brushed steel post-mortem table with exit flushing sump. I joined forces with a load of little girls (as is my way) and we processed wet sand through this massive machine to end up as a brownish slurried goo that, using watering cans, cups, caddies and buckets, we fed down some drainpipes into other pots of brownish liquid and sediment. My shoes and clothes have been sandblasted but that just makes me as happy as a sandboy. I could have stayed all night.....

Insect day

Today is an inset day which is when the teachers are so tired they have a "Teacher Training Day" that apparently they could not hold during the regular, frighteningly long school holidays. So we all got up late but then Jof remembered she had to go to work so she left us to it. We do have real actual tasks but by 10am we'd done none of them: so we started the bonfire. This is to get rid of vast amounts of the front hedge but also to clear Erins' hedge, Martins' cupboard and a dozen or so cardboard boxes from Erins' house move. The pile was enormous but fortunately we have a well-designed personal inferno (as recommended by Satan himself) and a mere 3 hours later we put the last box on and had lunch.
Then we bussed it into town to take the camera to Boots. This is one of the cheap single-use cameras that Jof gave me when Pops and I drove pointlessly around southern England not going to Paultons park, Whipsnade, the Tower of London or any one of a myriad of attractions more interesting than the back seat of the car. Pops and I both took some pictures so I am confidently expecting world-class masterpieces of the back of the car seat, the back of my own hand and possibly Pops' nose from a distance of 3mm.
Supper was made more interesting tonight when Bud failed to read the note left by Jof listing meals for the week and decided to make a compound food-fusion smorgasbord-platter using some, all or fewer of the contents of the fridge. All was going really well up until the very final seconds when it was discovered that he had failed to switch on the oven so the kievs were cold and raw. There was a certain amount of frowning from Jof but I got 3 separate meals out of it so I'm not complaining.

Sneezing is believing

Arose at 0950 like a Ginormous Germanic Eagle.....to get a hanky.

Jof dropped us off in Langstone at the last road before the bridge and we battled the gales and typhoons all the way down the old Hayling railway line to the seafront.

The wind was in my face the whole way so it made cycling a lot more difficult, Bud had to keep pushing me. Anyway, we met rocks and sand dunes and a swamp and nesting seabirds and a pill box and some random brick structures and many criss-crossing footpaths and a groovy bike park and lots and lots of wind.

Quite a lot of the path is split into bikes and people one side and horses the other, we didn't see any horses but there was loads of horse poo so we know they were there. In the end, after 5 miles or whatever it was, we hit the seafront and met Jof just as she was parking so exactly right on time then.

We went into the tacky funpark and I went on the helter-skelter which is just a big curly slide but had one of my classmates on it, I had a go at the shoot-the-hillbillies game inside, we got top score. Bud aimed the rifle but I pulled the trigger at exactly the right time so I'm a good shot. Then I went on my first rollercoaster - well it was the one where you're in a boat and it splashes a lot when you go down the slope. It was quite scary and he said lots of words I hadn't heard before. We got very wet but it was a sunny day and so we dried out with the help of a 40-knot headwind.

FAIL

 Then we drove home for lunch and went straight back out again to got to Ben's party. His dad is now officially old so he did a barbecue while we dressed up and played pirate attack with all the weapons we'd brought. After a while we put on a DVD and sat quietly for at least some of it while the PuddleParents had their shandies and sherbets and sho forth. Jof did the washing up while we chased each other around with my new gun that shoots real bullets until it was time to go.

ps this one of Baby Edward (Bud calls him Eduardos but I don't think he's Spanish) is a little unfair. It's true, he is the ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal (daft as a brush but very very ravenous) and will eat anything. But Bud did encourage him to insert the breadstick into his own ear for artistic purposes.....

Voodoo child (Hendrix)

A lovely day for a strumble so having stolen Jof's fried egg for breakfast (she had boiled egg and bacon on toast) Bud and I wandered down to Tunnel park (meeting schoolies Harry and Thomas) for some climbing and so forth. But then in a break from tradition we climbed inside the trains enclosure and started walking around the track. This was a great idea and soon there were at least 5 others doing it in both directions. The girl with the broken foot couldn't so she just crutched along beside me.

Later: gymnastics.

In the afternoon we had another go at the hedge and entertained passers-by with all the shaking, sawing and shouting going on. Over the years, this hedge has dropped so many leaves that couldn't escape, they had mulched down, created real soil on top of the wall and the hedge then rooted into it. We put a stop to that.

Bath fizzer night music: Sheer heart attack by Queen.

Hark at I, innit?

The Paultons' Park tickets have been bought, I'm gettin' on my glad rags, I'm shinin' my shoes..... Tall Martin the bonfire helper has kindly kept an old cupboard to one side for me to put on the bonfire (ie he's using me to clear some rubbish out of his house) so we'll get that this afternoon, it'll help dry out the hedge that we shall destroy this weekend. While cutting the hedge gives us extra compost and bouncing fun (see post 4 days ago), it's just a pain and blocks light from the window so it's going to get a crew-cut.

Hmm. The thing about really old tangled privet hedges is... untangling them increases their volume by a factor of 3. So we chopped and sawed and dragged half the hedge into the back garden to dry off a bit before the Monday inferno, and it filled the whole back garden. This project may take more than 1 attempt to complete. Anyway, got loads of quality dry wood from Martin and then ErinsDad came round and donated several more cardboard boxes in bonus tribute, I sense a pyro-victory in the making.

Got in the shower before Bud had finished.

Madame Fifi Whiplash-Trixibelle (one of my devoted followers at Buds' work) has come up with an impressive new idea for a bike ride that we shall investigate on Sunday - the old Hayling Billy line. This is an old dismantled railway line from Havant to the seafront at Hayling which (apart from a missing bridge) has been turned into a coastal cycle path and bridleway. We'll do a preliminary on this by riding the length of Hayling Island, in preparation for a possible mass Puddle rally: if you cycle to Fratton, you can get a train to Havant which is where the line starts, then get the Hayling ferry back to civilisation..... that particular journey is approx 10-11 miles, so we'd have to stop off once or twice for a pub lunch and liquid refuelling session.

I only need one shot, baby

Missing Thursday football today for a joint birthday party for Ruby (this is how I spelt her name on her birthday card - ЯUdy) and Aisha from my school. I do not like events, dear boy, impinging on my regular schedule (change is bad) but you have to reconsider when 2 girls at once are asking you out. In fact, I've been worrying about my chances of reproductive success within the Piddler group. If Ben and Bobert take the plunge and get hitched in a civil ceremony and take themselves out of the running and the gene pool, that will leave Johnny and myself competing for rights over Beth, Erin and Poppy. These odds are better, but you just can't trust women so I feel I have to broaden my horizons a little and attend todays' party.

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PUDDLE NEWSLETTER

       

FOR SALE		QUALIFIED MEDICAL DOCTOR REQUIRED
GRANDMOTHER £3
OWN TEETH, GSOH		FOR TRIP BACK IN TIME
VGC, GOOD KNITTER		MUST HAVE SENSE OF ADVENTURE
SALE DUE TO UPGRADE		SWORD SKILLS AN ADVANTAGE
BUYER COLLECTS		GOOD HEALTH PLAN, SHARE OF SPOILS
BOX 163		BOX 163

                                                      

TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD

Norman Goatblower plays Gordon Glassblower, the tragic anti-hero in this piquant yet harrowing tale about an alcoholic pigeon-fancier who is driven to hallucinations and suicide by the incessant cooing of his pigeons, with whom he lives after being thrown out by his wife for his part in a Namibian refrigerator sting. In one of his darker moments he is befriended by a trolley collector from Tesco (played by the irrepressible Tyrone Bangs-Knutt) who gains Gordon’s trust and smuggles him in a supply of spirits and mixers in the hope of one day inheriting the pigeon collection. The obligatory car chase is inexplicably missing from this dire satire, which is a rehash of the 1958 Australian classic The Beerhunter. Don’t take the Mother-in-law to see this one unless she particularly enjoys seeing a drunk bloke trying to dodge a hail of pigeon droppings while complaining about his life and the missed opportunity to elope to Venezuela with Doris the school dinner lady. Carpentry fans will enjoy the loft scene in this straight-to-Betamax grainbuster, which is most likely to reach an audience as an in-flight movie on Ghanaian Airlines, the opening credits alone being worth the effort to get up and leave the room. Bollywood producers expressed an interest in the flock of pigeons, but visas proved difficult to obtain and the hapless birds were eventually eaten by some Vietnamese asylum seekers. Laughs are few and far between in this laborious journey through the seedier parts of Scunthorpe. In fact there were only two laughs in it – the cartoons before the main feature and 3 minutes into it when a fat woman in front of me fell over a corpse in her hurry to leave the building. Dennis the trolley boy was a source of some relief, if only due to some dubious continuity which saw him wearing three different pairs of trousers in one pivotal car park scene. Three different endings were filmed for this epidural of an epic, and I believe we saw all of them in a directionless hotch-potch of deleted scenes, Pythonesque animation and excitable voice-overs in an impenetrable Shetland accent. I would indeed pay 4½ Turkish Lira to see this film again because I would then be able to read a book in an empty cinema. The all-too-brief appearance by Gordon’s wife brought at least a little plate-throwing action along with her beration for his aberration, but, as she exited stage right, so did all hope of salvation for this lead-lined coffin of a movie.

                                                     7/10 xxx Not suitable for children under 3

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Well, the party was ace. It was in a long low building in a pub garden and it was full of girls. In fact once Erin had arrived I estimate that the girls outnumbered the boys by nearly 2 to 1 which is why many of them and I kept absconding into the pub garden to climb the flagpole, benches and tent thing (and to get told off by the landlady). The magician/childrens' entertainer/DJ (and his oriental sidekick) had us all laughing and dancing and jumping; he also had us heckling when he brought on a blatantly plastic dinosaur, balanced it on his leg and chatted with it.

 Still, he only had one arm free during the whole dino performance so maybe it did eat one arm after all. Incidentally, his accent wandered both up and down the country, and up and down the sliding scale of social class. I escaped during Abba but returned for the pass-the-parcel: I escaped for the macarena, YMCA and the limbo but returned for the food, the hokey-cokey and the magic show. Bud and ErinsDad escaped briefly as well and I saw them cradling pints of beer. After 2 groovy hours of partying we came home, I missed my friends at football but met Pops on the pavement. Good news, everybody! Her parents have released her to come to Paultons' park with us.