Scouting for Shells

Yesterday Jof and I were just about to go to the park when it started to rain so I chose next year's holiday destination instead. I have chosen Crete. In fact Bud has already called me a total Cretan, which is nice.
At school we did a 'Cold Write' where the teacher gives us a little story framework and we hang interesting things off it from our imagination to make a story. Today I used Groundhog Day as inspiration and had my 10 year-old boy refusing to buy superglue in the wood store to mend his mother's sofa leg, and instead breaking a pencil in half and stealing a car and driving it round a dump in a repetitive alternate dimension.
In the end (for morals must out) he decided to buy the wood glue anyway and fix the sofa so returned from his parallel universe via a wardrobe that glowed orange, as you do, minus an entire Thursday due to event-horizon effects.
But then I was back to reality and we visited a second-hand computer shop on Albert Road who agreed to buy Grandad's old laptop which he never used. Holding folding, we sped home practising the script for the great Scout Demo this evening. The Scoutmaster took the scouts away and we set up in the church canteen and once the audience was assembled we went through our little routine.

The Scoutmaster introduced him as Brad and I wore the Colonel's uniform and we took turns in reading from our script and they loved the swords and we got a series of ooohs and aaaahs getting bigger and bigger as we took larger and larger artillery shells out of the magic cabin trunk. After we'd done our spiel, there was a melee, free-for-all and general hubbub as the boys fought over the 4 1/2 inch shell casing and the girls went for the swords. The favourite was the Japanese Katana but the Iron Cross (second class) got plenty of attention. Then I got 2 swimming badges, why not.