A Right old Let-down

Up quite early and we had to go shopping. I had about £9 in my pocket money so I wanted a Minecraft book: my drudgery-payment for this was to endure shopping with Jof while he delivered some bedding to the homeless shelter and hit the charity shops of North End.
Meeting him back at home, we parked and the tyre went bang-hisssss, and we gradually sank down towards the pavement. I suppose it's good that we noticed, better than waking up to a flat on a Sunday morning.

He drove it round to the tyre replacement shop (about 200 yards) and I built a wooden house in no time at all, but also in cyberspace, where time doesn't matter anyway. That wheel was £60 of your Earth pounds wasted, I could have spent that on Lego FFS.
Some time ago, some nice policemen came to my school and security-tagged bikes for people but they'd run out of Plutonium or whatever by the time I got there so we looked up their advertised schedule and cycled down to Canoe Lake for today's session.
We cycled round and round but there were no policepersons at all, my second let-down, unreliable public services. So we did the Model Village (as promised last week) anyway. I deliberately sent Jof away citing bloke-ish things, but she met Erin and had tea and watched her push her dad in the sea so not totally wasted, although ErinsDad might have been.
I've done the Model Village before (4 years ago, with Ben) but I enjoy bestriding the world like a Colossus (not Bletchley Park's code-breaking computer) and I met the resident cat and climbed the castle and chased the trains up and down and actually recruited 4 followers in the 5-7 age range and we all chased trains for a while.
At last they all went home and we went down the tunnel. The Model Village is housed in a third-section of the Napoleonic era 'Lumps Fort'. Other sections of it are the Rose garden and the Oriental garden; the whole complex has 3 concreted 6" gun emplacements with splendid views of the deep-water channel and harbour approaches, and 2 bomb-proofed firing tunnels, one of each of these are in the Model Village.
There's also a bunker-style machine gun and observation post and the tunnel has a dozen or so embrasures (rifle firing positions) that cover the east and west approaches to the fort, but one enemy grenade inside would silence all of them.
I like the trains, the lines go on for hundreds of feet and follow a set pattern.
The cat wanders everywhere as do the kids, and a lot of the buildings have funny signs like:
I. Cloutim & E. Bellows Blacksmiths, Stagger & Tripp Brewers to the Nobility, Messrs I.C. Trees & Esau Woods Timber Merchants - Branches all over, Ivor Norse Bookmakers and quite a lot of funny gravestones in the churchyard along the lines of "My wife lies buried under this stone for her peace and my peace of mind".
Inside the old expense magazine they have model circus tents that are supposed to do something but don't, there's a lot of buildings etc made out of matchsticks that took some old soldier ages to complete but are now going seriously mouldy in the damp subterranean environment, not kidding, there are mushrooms. A free-standing shed holds a collection of historic dolls, if ever one needs a tactical nuclear strike, can I suggest this target.
Then I got an ice cream and we met Jof and he went for a run and we did some exercises and got a Lego Hero in a charity shop with my one remaining pound. Luckily he'd bought 4 Bionicles on his journey so I disappeared upstairs for ages.

Because of all this disappointment we started to talk about holiday destinations at suppertime. We've only done one but we learn fast and the little choosing subprogram protocol isn't much different - hot place with swimming pools and stuff.
The first place Jof found on the internet had a beach and 6 pools and one of them had a pirate ship in the pool and the rooms weren't rooms they were villas and each villa had its own pool ... oh dear.
So I had my first Bath Fizzer Night in ages, things keep getting in the way.