The Official Birthday I should have had

During a recent trip to the beach we discovered that the JBs were not so much double-booked as not-booked-at-all for one of the holiday days. So we booked them.

This is very good for me because I have such a drab and empty life, it's nice to have some co-conspirators with similar interests, such as Minecraft, Lego, and talking rubbish. Thus they were delivered to us nice and early and we started with a bit of Crafting but then left for Romsey Rapids, or as we call it, Womsey Wapids, intending to completely reprise my birthday party agenda from the 2nd of January this year, apart from not having a Ben.

So we talked rubbish on the way apart from an impressive 12 minute period of silence when we listened to the radio. When the Rapids are busy you only get 70 minutes before your wristband colour is called and you leave, if you get there at the wrong time you can get even less time, which has happened.

But fortunately everyone else was at the beach or at the Americas Cup so we got 2 and 1/4 hours of splashing, frolicking and playing tag. It became a challenge to stand on the bubbler discs and try not to fall off, also we did the waterslide a couple of times and even tried out the tiny-people's pool and slide. In the end we got out voluntarily, 4 minutes before our wristband colour was called.

We had a coolbag full of drinkies so sucked away for a while until we got to the Cowherds. This is our go-to pub in the Common in the middle of Southampton, right by Tiggleton Corner and this time there was no mud. Some local youths washed our car for charity, cheaper than the Romanians at Sainsburys and with more pink tutus. We ordered food and drew revealing things on the kiddie menus, always a window into the soul of a child. I did a series of Ms all over it, and gave the characters swords. Bob covered his in triangles and said it was Illuminati. The thing about Illuminati is, you have to say 'Nobody knows' so even if you say ok then, but what's this Illuminati thing all about then, they still say 'Nobody knows' and it's all rather pointless, apart from all the pointy triangles. Johnny wrote 'Jimbob' 37 times and drew a conversation about yogurts.

They got chips and I didn't. There was a dangerous minute where I almost descended into a Class A Sulk but he said go and buy some chips then, and then we all had chocolate brownies with ice cream anyway. We had schemingly prepared lots of bread for ducks, by buying it from the cheap shelf in the Co-op, and Jof had brought home some cake that a customer had brought in and they'd forgotten. When we got to the duck pond, the ducks were largely absent, the swans indifferent and the seagulls and pigeons numerous. They eyed us like a flock of static vultures.

The bread had been in the car the whole time so was quite hot, we found that if you scrunched it up, you could make little breadbombs and target the distant moorhens and we hit quite a few. We also shot each other in the head and butt with hot doughballs which is technically a food-fight, hurrah! By the time we'd finished the lake had a greater mass of bread than waterfowl but we'd done our duty and played briefly in the park and then got our swimming trunks back on for the splashpark.

This was not the same as in January. It was hot and full of screaming kiddies so we filled up the waterguns and shot them, the little gits. I didn't want to change back so elected to walk to the car in just a towel. We decided my cover-story for my strange garb should be that I was an autistic child so we walked to the car going 'Wooo!' and 'NURRR!' periodically so as to blend in. On the way home we tried really hard to drink all the drinks and eat all the emergency mini-cheddars and we all had a nap, then more Minecraft and Lego at home. We had them for about 9 hours and it was great, Robert is making a Navy dockyard. Jof went to the gym so I chose Rambo as the Friday Night Film because we couldn't get The Great Escape on the movie channel.