June 2017 1/4

I was most miffed to have to go to bed on time last night following a week of late nights.

But et hoc transibit, doncherknow, and school restarted. Afterwards, Ben and I came home via 2 sweet shops for sugary refuelling (that's dedication to our medication) because it was raining so Beach Day was off.

Last Saturday, I bought a Retro 8-Bit games console in the Science Museum in London.

But having tried to connect it to the TV in my room, I was unable to do so because of the retro (obsolete) co-ax connectors. So my minion had to go to Maplin's (Tandy and Radio Shack being unavailable) and get a co-ax to SCART connector at £13, a mere £2 less than the original cost of the console, no consolation there, hoho.

So Ben and I tried out some of the games and they were weird and fast and I crashed my B52 bomber and you were a mermaid blowing bubbles to hit floating shells and you had to avoid getting eaten by the sharks or any one of a million combinations of badly-drawn-item-you-can-move avoiding craps dropped by badly-drawn-items-that-hover-overhead while trying to eat lettuces or broccoli or any number of seemingly irrelevant badly-drawn-unidentifiable-objects.

And all this to a constant background tweetling of 8-bit synth music of dubious quality which all adds to the 80s feel. Then Bud got a new job, just when I was getting used to being picked up from school.

So we wet ourselves laughing and then he went home. In Scouts we played games and did a quiz on Lord Baden-Powell who invented Scouts in the first place. Originally he didn't hand out badges, but beads, and they had to carve them themselves. I won a packet of Lego cards and then had to walk home in the rain even though I was promised a Limo. I was angry.

Tuesdays are boring and start with PE. Well, they do with my spelling.

We all had to (in teams) find a Mediterranean holiday for Miss B and her partner and kid on a budget of £4000. Sham and I booked her on a £950 flight to Majorca with private transfer to a 4-star hotel with day-club for the brat. We have not yet discovered which team's efforts will be chosen by Miss B, nice to win but it's tough asking a pair of 11 year-olds to lash out 4 grand on the teacher's holiday.

And I was able to write a story based on our trip to Marwell Zoo in which a dust-devil possessed of evil spirits and intent haunted the Go-Kart track, and rose up whenever a driver passed. I solved the malevolent anthropomorphic dust storm entity with a leaf blower.

Today the wind tried to blow our garden away, probably in revenge for the leaf blower. It mostly failed but a lot of leaves and twigs are on the ground in the park. At home I solved 3 equations for Y for Grandad, why he still needs to know what Y is at his age I'll never know. I also showed Jof the 8-Bit lettuce game and I think she'll secretly play all night.

Wednesday was our school trip day. I have performed the Lion King at my theatre and the Year 6 play is again, the Lion King. So our Head-teacher organized a trip to London to see the aforementioned at the Lyceum in the West End, and I know it's real because I saw a poster for it in an underground station last Saturday.

And speaking of last Saturday, some of the parents and some of the kids had second thoughts about the going on the trip at all, because of the angry men killing people in London. But I know that the chance of actually meeting one of these terror events is minimal, we're in far more danger every day walking to school because we still don't look properly when we cross the road, even if we tell our parents that we do.

And they'd all spent the £40 on the tickets, too.

But as a compromise they said we won't let the kids out, just bus-show-bus. I had a packed lunch on the coach but because they said you have to pick up your own crumbs if you drop them, I ignored the lunch and just had the sack of crisps and chocolate instead.

The show itself was brilliant in a venue 3 times bigger that anything I've seen before. We were stage right on the first shelf of seats and the boxes were full of drummers and other performers and the costumes were enormous with 3 guys making the elephant and guys in giraffe costumes with huge necks and 3 were played by kids, and sometimes they walked through the audience on the bottom shelf.

The songs were loud and the ghost head of Mufasa was made by several players with bits of face on poles and I swear that at the end they made him wink.

It was a million times better than anything I've been in but that's because I work for a small local theatre that relies heavily on volunteers. I wish I could play at the West End. We didn't see any terrorists but Waitrose had cops and fire engines outside, suspicious vehicle at the US Embassy.

I got home at 8pm which meant I could only have 1 hour on Youtube, totally unfair.

General Election Day is apparently Thursday. Our School library was a polling station as was the junior school round the corner. Difference was, we couldn't go into our library but their entire school got a day off.

Now, I know what voting is, I've done it myself in school and have been voted in or out of a position depending. But a general election to see which lot runs the country is definitely someone else's problem.

So once the boring school day was over I arranged to meet some mates in the park for a bike ride. This counts towards my independence, I don't have as many independence points or street smarts as some others my age so it was nice to go out on my own and burn around the park for a while.

And I'd just settled down for a deserved 7 hour Minecraft stint when he said let's all go and vote then, and it just so happened to be at exactly the time it started raining.

Friday on my Mind

All week I've been asking is it Friday yet, getting myself in practise for 45 years of wage slavery perhaps.

But it finally arrived and we did some more of our African art project and some more story-writing based on the Lion King (I wrote a treatise on Mufasa and his growing pains, very topical) all rather pedestrian, yada yada.

But one of the letters we all brought home this week was notification of the Year 6 end-of-year Prom, which Jof is helping to organise. Cue lots of pre-teen angst as everybody realises they'll have to ask someone to the Prom, should be fun to watch.

In gardening we weeded every section of the many gardens outside our school, here's one of them. It has potatoes in it. While we were clearing it, we found a pair of headphones in the hedge.

Saturday Night's alright for Farting but I started at 10am with black pudding and scrambled egg. Everybody polished their plates, for it was good.

I have a tough daily schedule because I am currently playing Klash of Klans and have to do daily votes on Minecraft Server #1 and watch all the new Youtube videos and connect with my American friend on Skype and connect with Sydney on Skype and then randomly add to a few other Minecraft worlds I own. In fact, it's amazing I get any time to myself, I'm in such demand.

So I pretty well managed all of the above before a perfunctory luncheon and then we waited for Sydney to take her to acting. As she hove into view along our street, Small Iwan from the acting group waved from across the road. His Dad is one of the shop refurbishment guys that gave us some wood for the Scout campfire, we discovered. Incidentally, following the London Bridge terror attack, a new anti-truck obstacle (in this case, a giant ship's mooring bollard, so very much in keeping with the area's naval tradition) has appeared in the historic entrance (with its 2 large golden balls) to Her Majesty's Historic Dockyard. Not sure if the message to would-be terrorists is 'Balls' or 'Bollards', just saying. And there were armed cops in Gunwharf.

In acting we rehearsed our scene from "One man, 2 Guvnors" in which I have the lead role. And I know pretty well all my lines, even though there are a lot of them. The actual performance is 2 days before the Year 6 play 'Lion King', so plenty of opportunities for stage schizophrenia as I announce to Simba that his soup is getting cold, and open a hotel room door and say "Gareth, you are my son".

Finally, I have found that the tall thin girl I've been acting with for the last 6 weeks is called Laura, not Gareth, sometimes it's easier to remember people by the roles they play, rather than their actual names. So in this way, the Judge and Fox from Wind in the Willows told me my voice is breaking. In my opinion this is not something to be cried over and fixed with glue, rather a momentous milestone on the rocky road to adulthood.

And those suspicious seedlings have been planted out, which has given us lots more space in the back yard. Jof got home with some special stuff for the Year 6 Prom and had one of those terrible back spasms which meant she could only sit in a big chair an issue orders involving painkillers. Chocolate is a painkiller, right? Film night was 'Hot Fuzz' with rudeness and guns and underage drinking and satanic rituals.

Sunday was another pyjama day. I got a 2-hour Skype call with Sydney and Jof spent all day in pain. Later, Sydney and I made a new jointly-owned Minecraft world and took logical advantage of a new thing you can do on this server, which is to get married and kiss a lot. Maybe one day Minecraft will have the haptic teledildonics plugin app.

And so although it was a lovely day, I didn't go out at all and missed the live music at the bandstand and the vintage bus rally on the seafront and all that sunshine. But there was 'Stonehenge Apocalypse' in which a plucky archaeologist-turned-radio DJ tried to convince 5 guys in a primary school (representing the scientific establishment) that the computer generated henge which was moving around and making lightning signified the end of the world. And while 3 guys in a jeep (representing the entire armies of the free world) hastily drove up and down a field in Canada (representing Salisbury Plain) and threatened to nuke the naughty henge, the Establishment Archaeologist revealed he was a cult leader and believed the computer-generated Egyptian pyramid that had appeared in Maine would protect his followers from the volcanic eruptions currently ringing the planet, coming out of other pyramids on the map made by the guy with the tinfoil helmet.

It is a credit to the acting profession that the entire cast of 19 people could play so many parts in borrowed uniforms, that all outside filming was done at 530 in the morning so that nobody else was around to witness the end of the world, and that nobody burst out laughing at their own lines. Furthermore, it is a credit to the film-making industry that the petty-cash budget can be stretched by not employing scriptwriters, having the film crew's family members play bystanders, and by shaking the camera to indicate earthquakes. It's worth watching for the wandering accents alone, the historical inaccuracies and dodgy special effects are just a bonus. Well worth seeing. Next up: Ice-tastrophe and Fart-nado.