Gardening. Not an Uphill Struggle

Sometimes the waiting is the worst part, and I'm not talking Silver Service here. Over the holidays I was told to choose an after-school club to fill at least some of my afternoons with something other than Minecraft and racy Youtube videos, having given up swimming, extra-swimming and gymnastics. So I chose gardening, not only because it was the least ominous of the choices, which ranged from drama (do it already) to street dance (sounds dangerous), cheerleading (do not even) to football (no thanks). The other reasons were that I quite like gardens, having been brought up in a nice one, and that they have been using the same old stock photo on the gardening website for years and I reckon I could be the new face of horticulture, and get my image on a website, for that rarely happens, mm.

And after school we started the first lesson in which we planned papier mache bird feeders with lollipop sticks for the customers to perch on and Pringles tubes as the seed hoppers and it was quite fun actually. So here is an unrelated group picture from last year when we made bee hotels with the gardening teacher.

Incidentally, my crush revealed that she liked me all last year because I wasn't a common or garden rowdy shouter who only cared about football. That makes me the thinking crumpet's man, methinks. In school, we used to have a lesson called Team-Breaking. It was supposed to be Team-Building but we always ended up arguing more than at any other time so we re-branded it. This has now finished, to be replaced by Boy-Friendly Dancing. Now, funnily enough, all the girls were bang into it and pranced around merrily (handbags not included) and all us chaps stood moodily around at the peripheries trying not to make eye contact and failing entirely to join in. It can't get any worse than this, surely?

Anyhoo, when Bud got home he mentioned that he'd been buying the paper all week, waiting for me to be in it. And Holy Poodles, was I in it today. Our rampant team victory last Friday at the Lego Robot competition did not go unnoticed by our local news distributor who did us proud with a 2/3 page with 3 pictures, all our names and descriptions of how we bravely battled against much older kids to lift the trophy. And, just like when I have had such a busy day it's a delight to write my blog-post, the editor of the paper himself did an editorial saying how nice it was to be able to report on young people doing splendid things, and not about some bunch of chavs getting drunk and breaking bus stop windows again. I immediately texted all my Lego team-mates to tell them to buy the paper.