Anti-Jumping Medicine

For the last free day of half-term I was scheduled to visit Obscure Cousin Margaret who is always a good laugh. Once Jof had gone to work I made a new deal with Bud in which I could take my tablet for the car journey but if I ever did the Grumpathon like yesterday, I'd lose screen privileges for a full week.

During the journey I asked him why he chose to be bald and we only parked on the motorway once, at Chichester like always. Margaret taught us One-Upmanship or Stabble or WordTower or something, in which you play Scrabble but you can stack a new letter on top of an existing one for extra points, as long as the new word makes sense. It's all very well but you have to be able to spell so some of my best words weren't.

Upstairs from Margaret is a Spanish boy of 11 who doesn't get to go out much because his parents work so we took him to Worthing with us. We footballed along the seafront having parked in exactly the same place where the Invisible Traffic Warden stole £25 from us last year and we went to SandPark #1 which has excavators.

These are always good and it wasn't actually raining this time but at lunchtime, our pet Spaniard wanted to play minigolf, chase the squirrel, play football on the minigolf course, and jump on the shingle rocks all at the same time. I think he had a deficit of attention, the way he got distracted by everything.

Lunch was on the pier. We've tried it there before but this was the first time it's been open for us, and we all had fish and chips. It was quite big. I ate all my fish and hardly any chips, and he ate all his chips and hardly any fish. The restaurant looks like a 19th century Cunard liner and had a little stage and adverts for shows full of international stars, but the only name we knew was Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer, all the others must be really big in Kuwait.

Outside is a flashing-lights arcade with lots of beeping machines and one of them (the 2 pence moving staircase shoving machine) had a £5 note dangling over the edge of the Profit Precipice like a bogey on a 2 year-old. This became our target and we both changed up £2 of 2ps and started shoving like maniacs.

You don't have much leeway for tactics on the 2p-shover but we really tried and won 8 lollipops but no fiver, which laughed at us as it hung there drying in the breeze of our increasingly frantic farting.

Once the adults had taken his moneybag away and dragged us away from the machine, we found another that spat out lines of ticket-tokens every time you killed a fish so we collected handfuls of them, and then noticed that all the other 2p and 10p shoving machines had a dangling £5 note in various states of suspended distress and we surmised that they were glued there to persuade gullible guys like us to waste £3.86 on trying to win them.

On the way back to SandPark #2, he jumped and quacked and schmozzled and gibbered and changed the subject more often than I do and it turned out he does in fact have some anti-jumping medicine but we hadn't brought it along. Still, he loves Minecraft so he can't be all bad.

Back at the flat, Margaret gave us an antique ladies' writing desk with marquetry outside and ebony/ivory drawers within, on dainty legs with orc's feet holding balls. It was made by my great-great-grandfather. I don't quite know where we're going to put it.