Golden Snatches and Sunken Benches

Days off with Jof are often relaxed so I got up at about 11 and after Brunch we made it out onto the mean streets of Pompington to see what we could see.

Yesterday we had to adapt our plans a bit but in this life, you adapt or die and so we went to the Southsea Model Village. Not a Communist Utopia like good old Naughty Korea, this is a partially dismantled wartime fort which has been home to a dubious collection of pottery figurines, a rather inventive railway and a lot of bad jokes for a number of years. The council can't possibly redevelop the listed building so it remains a post-modern nightmare-kitsch throwback to times past with badly-maintained fences and a hankering for a saucy postcard outlet. We cycled down there, because having done it yesterday, there really was no excuse not to.

They advertise a "stunning new refurbishment" which was one elderly chap going round painting one porcelain villager per day. To be fair, MyDogSighs (a talented local artist who we have met) has done another splendid mural by the entrance to the rifle bunker (doubles up as Santa's Grotto in wintertime) and both the Castle and the water features have been cleaned up.

They had an Easter competition to espy as many golden eggs as possible. You can see one at the top of the head of my shadow. The original maximum was 17, apparently, we found 15 but you can't be sure if some of the gold has been snatched. One kid said he'd seen 21 and we all laughed at him. I won some sweeties. We all won sweeties.

The obligatory malevolent yellow-eyed cat was missing which made Jof sad but there were plenty of local youths climbing on the wooden rose frames in the rose garden next door and I tried out the zipline of death in Canoe Lake Swingpark and then we were hungry.

I am due to visit London tomorrow and Bud had prepared a picnic bag. We had raided it totally and then decided we wanted hot food anyway. So we found the newer seaside eatery (the one that Jof didn't like last time) and I had Haddock Crunch and she had Croque Madame (like Croque Monsieur but with extra fried egg) and everybody had chips, hurrah.

Outside the seaside eatery they have benches of all nations. The slight drawback being, it's on the shingle beach which is an unpredictable, moveable feast, practically feminine in its random indecision. One day you can sit happily at the sunny benches, the next day the angry sea has moved the beach around out of spite and you can't stick an apologetic leg in without risking dismal death by drowning.

In gymnastics I had to do conditioning circuits which made my legs tired. In half-handstands you're upside-down for 30 seconds and it made my ears go pink. At supper, Bud did a silly speech about how the phone and entire LAN network was down at his work and the IT department said raise a ticket online and give us your contact number, I got hiccups laughing.