The Lucky Toad (kissing the right frog)

I have a wide choice of girls all wanting to marry me. Apart from the obvious Erin and Pops, there are several at school and one at gym. I know this because they often ask me to play kiss chase. He said "Lucky you, hardly anybody wanted to play kiss-chase with me when I was a kid". So I retorted "Yes, but you went to a boys-only school". Pensive silence.....

So because the Weatherguessers had poo-pooed tomorrow, we decided to do Chichester today. It's a fairly old town with plenty of Roman bits left and I haven't been there in years. Obviously the first thing to do is seek out new parks, and boldly swing them. Google Earth helped us locate Hardham Road swingpark and we parked in an industrial estate to avoid parking charges.

This park has a decent assault course with beams, monkey rings etc, a basketball area, lots of green space and an 8-seater swinging rope. Drawbacks include a sparsely populated kiddie area with a rusty swing that sort of honks every arc and a squeaky see-saw. Also the whole area is waterlogged so you're never far away from mud. Also the swinging basket was minus its basket. But the walking-planks with troll bridges under and the pan's pipes balancing posts are good. We did the whole circuit twice in some mean drizzle and were the only ones there.

On the way back we couldn't help but notice this small cul-de-sac that made me want to strum.

Bleedin' miles away was Chichester proper. We could have parked a lot closer.

Many charity shops were available once we'd got past all the hoity-toity designer outlets in medieval buildings and I scored 4 bath fizzers and a Lego FA cup. I won't particularly keep it as a cup and have ditched the instructions and ribbons but it did yield a lot of bits.

For lunch I demanded sausages and found them in The Buttery in the Crypt. This rather swish cafe in a medieval butter-making dungeon fed us extremely adequately and we hit the 900 year-old Cathedral for some stone appreciation. I do like a good tomb and kindly avoided all the Private No Entry signs and investigated side-chapels and the chorister's bit and so forth. There are many intriguing doors you can't get in and a lot of leaflets, which I took. The main attraction to me is the bell tower or main steeple, and the extremely elderly lady on enquiries didn't know if either of them would ever be open to the public for some altitude investigation. She said she'd been up there once back in 1868 but that didn't help me. 

On the way back to the car we found a lost toad on the wrong side of the road. We put it in a church graveyard which turns out to border Whyke Lake, the first of several lakes in the region. I don't think it would have been lucky enough to cross that road again without getting squished.
After swimming we picked Jof up from work and got fish'n'chips and I emptied my plate with gusto, or was it ketchup. Bud had to make a special trip to Tesco to buy assorted chocolate.

Hobbit Corner: I'm not going to throw this away because

● The 2nd dead freezer by outhouse #3, act 3, scene 2. Yes, it's rusty, non-functional and on its back, and inside are several plant pots and their ex-contents that have gone through putrefaction and out the other side. But if I get rid of it, where will I put the laundry basket when I'm hanging out the socks?

● The empty Marmite jar. Once we finished a jar of Marmite at breakfast and we put it in the recycling.

Grandma got very worried when she couldn't find it, retrieved it and placed it next to 2 other empty jars of Marmite in her special Marmite jar holding facility (shelf). When questioned, she said you can pour boiling water into them, rinse them out, and keep the resultant liquid as the base for a nourishing stock. The fact that she'd finished 3 large jars before doing this did not seem silly in the slightest. Once emptied they would be consigned to the Secret Jamjar collection:  back in 2010 we found it. 352 jamjars spread across several buildings, each one washed and lidded. The lids had rusted solid in the intervening 20 years. She also had several cupboards full of old margarine tubs, those little styrofoam trays you get chicken fillets on, hand cream pots and the moulded plastic tray things that chocolate biscuits come in. All were empty, neatly stacked and ordered, until we took them all to the tip.
● Free seeds from Good Housekeeping magazine 1987. A plant-by date of 1988 means nothing to the people that time forgot.
● Large box of assorted coinage. You never know when the Drachma will make a comeback.
● Loft full of wallpaper from 2 walls ago. If the next owner of this house strips off the top 2 layers, they might want to put this one on again.
● Xmas wrapping paper. If you carefully unwrap a present with nail scissors, spending more time than it took to wrap it up in the first place, you may be able to reuse the paper. Flatten it out, put it back in the Xmas box for next year. When I first arrived and tore the paper off like any 2 year-old, it caused much tutting and consternation.