A Life is like a Garden

Goodbye Spock.
Today Jof went to work so we planned a trip out that she wasn't interested in. The Mary Rose was one of Henry the 8th's favourite warships and she sank in the Solent 500 years ago while defending against those naughty French people.
Half of it sank into the mud and was preserved, the stick-up half of it got eaten away by marine life and tides, so the purpose-built museum is ship-shaped and you get to walk through the missing bits of hull and decks and see the planks and spars and bulkheads and so forth that were recovered.
We got the magic all-day bus ticket and at the dockyard I squashed a couple of pennies to add to my souvenir collection and did the Mary Rose tour. It is very worthy, hugely valuable, from an archaeological and reference point of view, and has been lovingly recreated and salvaged at great cost to the nation, giving a vital window onto 16th century life and technology.
But unlike the Warrior, Alliance or Victory, you just can't climb up it and get busy with it, because it's a wreck in preservative solution behind glass with big air pipes everywhere.
This dog is called 'Hatch' and he ate rats for a living but went down with his ship.
But we liked the cannons and the axes and the gold coins and skulls and stuff. It was also full of kids (who'd have 'em?) including a couple of loud girls ("lookit skelington, mummeee, lookit, it's really scary..." but eventually we left them to it and I bought a sword in the shop and we wandered off.
They've built a new bit of museum since we were last there so we climbed up the Bofors 40mm (got 2 of those) and squashed some more pennies and played minehunting in the room with the torpedoes and didn't meet Elizabeth's mum.
In the food halls with boats hanging off the roof I had adult-sized fish'n'chips but they'd run out of adult-sized fish so I had 2 fried kids instead. Outside the toilets are some old-style vintage coin-operated games like they had on Blackpool pier and we saw a man drop a 1 pound coin under one of these mechanical Turks so we waited for him to go and then we 'found' it. Also I got a copper pencil sharpener in the shape of a lighthouse and we got the bus to Victoria park.
I like that park because of the big rope climbing frames and we were just playing the bit in Terminator 2 in the Pescadero State Mental Hospital lift by stabbing through the ropes as I climbed along it when he stabbed me in the eye with the sword but it didn't stop us finding another £1 coin.
After I'd bought some pyjamas in M&S (you've just gotta hate those junior manikins, lucky I was armed) we popped into Jof's work to make her smile and watched Rambo: First Blood for Film Afternoon. Jof demanded choccie cake and the film "What's up Doc" which was funny.
We were supposed to watch "Trading Places" for film night but I outvoted and we played Monopoly.
The last time we played, the board was a bit elderly and decrepit so we bought a new one and promised to salvage the playing pieces and hotels etc from the old board, bought by Jof's parents 25 or so years ago. The set had had a good run, I suppose, so we christened the new board and salvaged as promised. I was the wheelbarrow, Jof went for the Cat, and Bud stuck with the old hat. There are a few new cards and sub-rules, so look out!