El Nino: 99 weather balloons

Looking forward to  a weekend of bluster. I got 9/9 in the spelling test again so an extra sticker there. However, the majority of the class fell down on Quickly and Quietly. Thus the cruel yet rather attractive teacher has added those 2 words to next week's test and we'll have to do 11.

Today we zipped straight out and bought me some new school shoes. Last time we did everything right - proper measurement, walk up and down trying out 3 pairs of shoes - and still I managed to give the green light to an uncomfortable pair which I have since refused to wear. We were determined to do better. He chased me up and down the shop trying to lick my ear, for this is the normal activity one should expect from a school shoe: the pair I chose (the only ones in my size) were brilliant and let's hope the £36 doesn't come back to bite me in the butt. While walking to and from the shoe shop, through the rain, I sang my latest song. It is: "Badoo, badoo, badoobly doobly doo, badoo, badoo, booblydoobedoo" to the tune of the Pink Panther.

You'll appreciate that the first couple of hundred yards of this tune are mildly amusing but then it gets a little old: it was only when we found the dead rat in the gutter that I stopped. Then we had an animated conversation about the relative merits of the Maxim machine gun versus the .410 shotgun in dealing with rats. I of course favour the 600 cyclic rounds per minute but he favoured the shotgun - not just for economic reasons. As a child in approx 1978, I spent some time on a mixed arable/dairy farm just outside Dorchester learning to use a .22 rifle and, having ferreted for rabbits, we hunted rats near the grain silos. We stuck a hosepipe on the Land Rover exhaust and put the other end down one of the many rat holes nearby. Switch the engine on, await the rats. They get CO poisoning and pop up still running yet only 1/2 way out of the holes: an easy target for a shotgun. I had the .410, but the farmer himself used a 12-bore. These cartridges were 10p a go - so not as expensive as obsolete antique machine-gun ammunition, but getting there.

Then it was double swimming. This is to make up for last week's missed lesson due to a boiler malfunction: the full hour in the pool was awesome and I'll be doing that again next week, thanks.

Tomorrow I visit the GParents in Ooo-Arr land to help them move house. Bud has been busy obtaining 30 flat-packed cardboard boxes (and one Dracula coffin full of pink foam) to help them. I learn that Mick the Kind Manager has sadly been redundified. Thus they shall be Michael-less at Michaelmas.

After supper we made Chocolate Bomb-bombs - a heady mix of the last remnants of BensMum's Cornish Ice Cream (even more Ooo-Arr than Dorset) plus a massive selection of assorted choco-sprinkles. Then, full of victory, I killed Jof at Uno. BensMum reckons she is some kind of Uno champion, but Bud told me the secret - if your opponent looks horrified and calls you a totaltotaltotal poo-head, then you know you're playing it right. Consider the gauntlet well and truly inserted, baby!