Bere, Bare and Beer. But no Bears

At the beginning, I really didn't want to go out. But Mr "Let's go out 'cos it's sunny" forced me to and we got the walkie-talkies back out of where they'd been packed and hit the park. It was quite full and I played with Genevieve (girl, not outmoded car) and swung and climbed. Got my hair cut, turns out there's a grade 1 1/2 so had that.

The butcher said we had to wait 20 minutes for my favourite giant sausage rolls to be cooked so we hit Tunnel Park as well. We found a really big steel ball-bearing in the gutter and rolled it down the slide. 1 soss roll later, we'd only just got home when Jof ran in and said the nice policeman had given her 8 minutes to drive the car away before he had it towed by the car-lifting lorry so we gathered everything together and left for the Hundred Acre Wood, aka Forest of Bere.

Now, I have been to this location before with 1st wife Erin, so I was looking forward to telling everyone where to go. We accidentally turned off the motorway one stop too early but that just meant more countryside for us. Jof wanted lambs and she got them in Wickham: they weren't bouncing but the roads were. At the car park I leapt out and shouted my way around the sandpit and balancing beams and instructed the parents on how to negotiate the treehouse and the ladder-tower and the wooden crocodile and the assault course and the swinging baskets and the rope swinger and the gorse bushes and stuff. I acted as guide and made sure I kept shouting instructions. We investigated some woodlands and helped the beavers make their dam.

Jof wanted lunch. Both Bud and I had told her to get picnic food in ASDA but she said there was a cafe. The cafe was a small stall and they had run out of everything except chocolate cake and apologies. A small girl trod repeatedly on Jof's foot as she shouted angrily at them for cheating her out of a deserved luncheon. I had soss roll #2 and Bud had the butcher pasty that he'd secretly brought along and Jof had a satsuma. I was hot enough to take off my shirt and took pity on the hungry Jof and shared my soss roll and choccie cake with her.

Then we did the big walk. I was still being the guide so I darted down side alleys and tangential paths that went the wrong way and eventually we reacquired the main artery and Bud took over guiding. This went very well and we met some toy poodles and some wet dogs and 2 ponds (2nd world war bomb craters) and some horses and a stream and another pond and lots of sticks. Then right at the end our new guide (the one who'd used the wrong motorway turnoff) took us down a faraway path with no wet dogs or people on it and it was quite good for a while until it turned into mud.

Jof is not qualified on countryside and it's lucky she had the sturdy birch stave that Bud had made for her, for she got quite annoyed with the sludgy footpath that petered out and became a muddy bramble patch, which was not on the official map.

But we trusted him because the way back was miles and we could hear the kids in the playground so we soldiered on and popped out right by our picnic spot. We were home in meedle of no time because we didn't go wrong and we put our feet up for some serious sofatime while all our clothes were laundered. We'd done about 2 1/2 miles of forest-grade yomping and our little feeties were tired. Excellent day out, though.