Squandered, eschewed, forsaken and splatted

Grandma and Grandad are moving house a little quicker than they expected. This means that the "2 blokes in a van" trip down to their place to collect furniture and ornaments (and teeth) can no longer wait until the the end of next month, it suddenly has to be much sooner.

Now, I was really looking forward to that trip. It's my last chance to see the house that they've lived in for 25 years, the swingparks and exercise parks of 'Historic Dorchester', the fountain where there are always so many coins, the unknown holes in the hedgerows (Badger? Fox? Rabbit?) and to use the secret key to climb the belltower of the medieval village church.

 Of course, I've done all these things and more, including playing with the shotgun, the hidden leafy dells and glades by the babbling brook and bridleway, the rear entrance to the exclusive girl's school, the Norman clocktower of Sherborne Abbey, the narrow country lanes that seem so busy with tractors and horses and the ready supply of bonfire wood that half an acre in the depths of the countryside affords.

But all that was before my seventh birthday. I may retain early memories, and there are certainly a wealth of photographs, but it's always good to have one last emotional trip into the land of the past and really lay down those memory engrams, before the past passes into the past, and you're past it. (Well parsed!)

But there's a problem. That means I would miss Johnny's birthday party at the Gymnastics centre. And when it comes to a choice between an hours' short-termist pleasure with my friends and a lifetime's happy memories of my rural origins, there's really no comparison. He shall go on his own.

As far as most clocks go, the day begins at midnight. But by then I'd already been vomiting loudly for an hour. I'd put so much down the toilet, Jof said there can't be any more, come into my bed. This was clearly a challenge and I filled the bed with supper and lunch and some things I don't remember eating and the whole lot was soaked. Bud got me a bucket and I used it successfully at 0300 and I met him again at 5 something when he was showering, he'd gone by the next one at 6. Jof keeps running off to the toilet and we can't risk the journey to Nanna's today, maybe tomorrow. Dear Follower Corinne speaks of a 24-hour both-ends-at-once bug, sounds familiar.

These random sickie days off are all very well, they sound good, nothing to do but watch TV in your pyjamas etc, but once you actually try to watch rubbish oft-repeated TV in your jim-jams all day then it gets real old real quick, I'm telling you. Especially with Jof asleep upstairs and Bud trying to pack saucepans quietly.

He got me a snack. I loved it. For an hour, so did my tummy. Then it didn't. Jof and I are not happy. A few toasts later, we're just hoping it'll stay down and we'll be able to visit Nanna tomorrow.