Let them eat Lebensraum

Saturday with added sunshine. But first I had a bad dream at 0200 and invaded Jofs' bed, forcing her to get me medicine and so forth just when she was trying to sleep for the work day ahead.

I awoke in the wrong bedroom and once sorted, we walked to the Pompey ticket office to reserve a couple of seats for the pre-season friendly against Charlton Athletic in July. But they weren't on sale yet, so we knocked on Poppys' door (not in again, I've heard of playing hard to get but she is an unattainable girl) and saw that the new owners of our old house have ripped out the booze cupboard as part of their remodelling.

After much painting and Phineas & Ferb, I needed to streeeetch my legs so we did the park, swing-basketed some 4 year-olds, got rid of some empty bottles, bought some pasties, all the usual stuff but in Vitamin D-providing solar radiation the likes of which we have not seen this year.

After guess what, more painting, we headed off to the St James field "Picnic on the green" annual village fayre thing. It's a big field with a lot of stalls, what more can I say. The Marching Band of Dubious Talent was inexplicably missing, although the Dog Show and Gardeners' Question Time was there as usual.

I met many schoolfriends, several Beaver-Scout friends (unsurprising as the 5th Portsmouth Scouts have a stall there every year), a couple of random ex-Puddlers of other vintages, the Ugly Twin Sisters from gymnastics and Ben. Ben instantly outranked everything and we played attack-the-fallen-branch happily and then did the bouncy castle and didn't eat our specially-prepared picnics and so forth. The old people tried to get us to do the egg'n'spoon race, junior sprint, piggy-back etc but we said poo to you, that's all boring.

We played everything there was to play on the Scout stall, winning many sweeties. I think they are sponsored by a consortium of local dental practitioners. The chuck-a-meerkat went down well, we didn't do swordfighting but did do penalty shootout, and we didn't go down the pub because the JBs weren't there. We did, however, sit transfixed through an entire performance of Punch'n'Judy in which several brightly coloured puppets hit each other with sticks in a variety of comedy duck-accents in an incandescent mushroom-related display of Madness of Yesteryear.

I cycled round and round the park on the way back, working off some of the sweetie calories. My first comment was "When can I next see Ben?" It's been the best day ever, since yesterday. More painting, more TV, more tuna pasta. 10pm? I suppose I ought to shower and bed.