You don't have to be mad to work here

For a while there, we thought that Wednesday Park would be off due to adverse weather conditions.

But fortunately the fates smiled upon me once more and once I'd invited 2 friends to be X-box co-conspirators, I scooted to the park and met up with the usual suspects.

One of our games is kicking the big yellow tennis ball over the thatched roof but this time one of our team got it stuck up there. Most people would sulkily accept this but our house isn't far away, so a ladder was retrieved and Bud went up onto the roof.

On the narrow flat-roof area were: lots of branches and sticks and lumps of moss, our football, 3 tennis balls, another football (deceased) and a red light sabre.

All of these were returned to the fray and nobody found it in the least unusual that a man was brazenly carrying a ladder through the park, because these things are invisible, the same as a man with a clipboard and a determined expression.

I scooted round the skate park and that's when we saw all the big black clouds that were trundling towards us on the arctic wind conveyor, and we ran away home like little scared people. But we did have our ball back.