Spud U'd Better Like

Over another bacon and egg breakfast, he gave me the good news. I was to go shopping with him. Normally I'd be able to fob off this pathetic gambit with a direct refusal and retreat to the Catacombs of Minecraft.

But the Harvest Festival is next week and the Scouts - which have church links as one of their cornerstones - always join in. I could attend the church service or just send in a packet of harvest-related goodies for distribution to the local food banks. Now, Jof does this anyway and I have watched with wonder on numerous occasions as she gathered one or 2 basketfuls of decent foodstuffs at the supermarket for only a tenner and put it in the Food Bank Bucket.

My mission (and I did willingly accept it) was to make £3 go as far as possible, with extra kudos for inventive or thrifty ways to extend the bounty. I took my own trolley and a calculator and headed off on my own. In the end, I barely needed the calculator, because everything I found was 20p or so, and I kept count in my head. I hit the £3 right on the head. So here is my trolley-load entry for the "3 Quid Harvest Challenge". We have done a similar exercise at school so this was child's play. So the pile is large, but you must notice that it's Root Vegetables'R'Us, with only the barest hint of biscuit.

Jof always says that she's working from the inside to increase the amount of vitamins consumed by food bank customers, I personally will increase starch levels in the potato-obsessed.

In the car I educated Bud on the Joy of Blocks. In my Minecraft world, I recently discovered a ravine (cave) which allowed me access to many ores and secret abandoned mineshafts and mod spawning points and Silverfish and Ender pearls and Zombies and Redstone and Herobrine's Lair and the Stronghold and Obsidian formations and Cave Spiders and he seemed to take it in but doesn't realise how important it all is.

Anyway, the whole of Southsea seafront was blocked to traffic for a mammoth bicycling event. In the beautiful autumn sunshine, cyclists young and old paraded along the parade, perhaps that was what it was for before the invention of the motorized charabanc. Jof and I chose the sofa option. Later, we saw Mission Impossible 3 which has skyscraper entry via the roof, moles in the agency, lots of dark whispering in dark corners and treachery and secret weapons and it's much like the previous 2 in that regard.