Futbol mondial

We all woke up at 10, I could get used to holidays. Fortified by egg and black pudding, I built a bit more Lego, do you like my galleon, with sails unfurled?

Eventually it was time to meet Ben and the JBs in the park for football. They brought an Ethan and another Ben, and because there were enough of us it all went off perfectly well with clans and factions and tribes that kept changing, if you weren't happy playing football there were plenty of other activities. The JBs wear Manchester United shirts because their Dad keeps banging on about them, but Ben has followed suit so half of us were alleged Mancunians. They had also brought identical MUFC footballs. For no apparent reason I have declared an affiliation with Liverpool, even though there's a football club practically at the end of the street.

We got 2 1/2 hours running around in the fresh air which is just the sort of thing the PuddleParents approve of. The PuddleMummies sat and chatted for hours, Bud ran 10 miles and found a £10 note by the coffee van on the seafront and the PuddleDaddies kicked balls. Er. There were only a couple of howls, A kicked B's leg in a bad tackle, C wasn't allowed to play in Game D, that sort of simple fare.

Then, in another mildly unexpected move, Bud turned up with a B+Q shopping trolley he'd found at the traffic lights. Others would choose to ignore it, but not us. To general confusion, it was wheeled towards us but I knew exactly what it was for and hopped straight in. Ben got in as well for the standard ride around the park, but his Dad said he wasn't allowed to because he had had a bad experience with a crashing trolley in his youth. Ben objected loudly and so Johnny and I got the full circuit, rattling around at high speed and not crashing and burning at all, not even a little bit.

Then it was home time and we volunteered to take the trolley back to B+Q like last time which meant I got to ride it for ages and ages and all the members of the public we passed waved and smiled at us, apart from the kids who were all jealous.
Hobbit Corner
Today's visit to the Shire that Time Forgot is about soap. As you know, when a bar of shop-bought soap runs out, you get a little thin sliver that breaks up in your hands and is no good any more. But the Hobbits had a special tray (formerly a punnet of raspberries or similar) where all the slivers go to die. When sufficient saponified matter hath built up, it got moistened and re-moulded into a lumpy, multicoloured soap of all nations. There is nothing wrong with these recycled clods, in fact they have done sterling work in the utility room, the bathroom, the upstairs spare sink, the downstairs toilet and the kitchen sink. But the ever-festering tray of glutinous gumption on the windowsill did not add to their house, aesthetically, and they finally (with much reticence) ditched the project in order to sell the house. A quick look in cupboard #3 of the bathroom revealed enough resurrected soapy clods to last a lifetime and given that each of these reanimated coalescences must one day turn into a sliver of uselessness, it is possible that there are soap molecules within that have been re-re-re-recycled from 1952, like the nitrogen molecules still present in the atmosphere that once took part in Julius Caesar's last breath. It's not like soap is expensive.