Perfect 10

Well, I'm not saying I'm absolutely perfect. Just a definite 10.

So it was around that time I awoke and downstairs, there was a little pile of birthday cards for me, many with £10 notes inside, although one was a £10 postal order, didn't think such things existed any more. Grandad gave me a book called My Family and other Animals, don't know what he's getting at there but he liked 1956 and he's sticking with it.

The breakfast bacon was not even frying when Bud got home from his day at work, all the more time to serve me. Then he forced me to get on my bike and buy a sieve, of all things, but also 3 booster packets of Pokémon cards with my new birthday Pokémoney and we were only out of the house for 40 minutes so I only spent 30 minutes complaining.

I'd floated the idea of going to the Pyramids with the JBs and they took the bait so we ran to look at the hole in the sea wall which had expanded pleasingly. Lots of the red pavement has been eaten by the sea and the corrugated iron retaining skirt has burst satisfactorily but the long concrete blocks remain hovering in mid-air like some kind of Minecraft construct IRL.

We viewed it from a few angles and went swimming. The attendant lady said it was so busy there was a 40 minute wait and the inflatable wasn't working and the waterslides weren't working so we went to play 'It' in the sunken sub-tropical water gardens next door for the duration of the specified delay.

This splendidly peaceful area contains many paths with switchbacks and dead ends and bushes and trees of all nationalities and exciting pond obstacles and gnarly trees all at 4 different levels, so an ideal location for a game of 'It'. We designated Jof as 'It' and off we went, scampering through the undergrowth, disappearing into thickets, meeting to exchange whispered intel on the last known sighting of Jof which always seemed to be '20 minutes ago, heading in an away-type direction'.

Those of you who know Jof know that she is a hardened attack-style stealth commando who will sneak up on you silently from unknown directions using secret portals and inhuman speed, so we capered and hid and traversed the many paths in terror and you know, we hardly ever saw her, which proves how good a tracker she is.

But then the attendant said 'Oh yes, it's all open, you could have gone straight in' and we did. There followed 90 minutes of freestyle water-action with a surprisingly good game of catch with a beanie ball and lots of jumping in and underwater hand-stands but eventually we had to go home and Robert watched 12 minutes of 'Night at the Museum' before joining us 10 year-olds upstairs with the Lego Heroes, which had to come down out of the loft.

We shot them with my new Nerf guns and shouted and traded rude words and played Army and snacked and were happy, just like the old times which have never really gone away. Just before my birthday dinner of macaroni cheese, I actually voluntarily cleaned up my own room. Us 10 year-olds are grown up. With chocolate, "Aching Leg Syndrome" and persuasion, I managed to delay bedtime to half past midnight, who needs acting lessons when the dark side is in-built?