A Wattle of Bills

School was disastrous. I'm never playing football again. Because I'm not destined to play for Manchester United like all my mates, I get put on the same team as the girls (which at least scored me a girlfriend last week) and Harry and Ben and Gene and James are on the other side and of course I'm going to get crushed underfoot by the advancing armies of the future Mancunians.
My shoulder got hurt and then I tripped up over my own foot on the way to the library and sat on my leg and later I discovered 2 mosquito bites on my ankle. I don't believe a day could be any worse.
So on the way home it started to rain heavily and it was certainly raining in my heart. I tried to elicit sympathy but he didn't seem to believe me. I knew that a tragedy such as this should get me out of any scheduled jobs and onto the sofa with Minecraft for the duration, but he didn't see it that way and I had to go to bed in protest. A battle of wills ensued.
Then he started doing laundry to pass the time and said I wouldn't get anywhere near a screen until I did some work, so I broke up some damaged pallets for the upcoming Scout camp fire and bought some soft fruit for my pudding and it wasn't so bad.
Jof helped me do a Viking dwelling-unit for my school topic. Built of clay, lollipop sticks and pipe cleaners, the authentic structure wasn't going so well and Bud helped by making a roof, we figure that if we use dried Pampas grass from our own front garden, we can cover up the fatal design flaws with some superficial ones. And we can put a small plastic goat in the doorway to say he's going inside, to distract attention from where the door doesn't meet because we ran out of lollipop sticks. My job was to roll out poo-shaped bits of clay and tell Jof that she was doing it wrong.