As dim as a TOC H Lamp

So last night Grandad was complaining about the low candlepower on his bedside light, how is he supposed to read with that, etc.
Dim as a Toc H lamp, he said.
Turns out that this archaic term is from Talbot House (and shortened to Toc H by the patois of the early signallers), a bible-bashing alternative to the NAAFI in wartime years and thereafter, a safe haven with branches in battlefields across the world where you could get a cup of tea and a sermon when beset by bullets.
Their emblem is a brass oil-style magic genie lamp with added double crucifix (cross of Lorraine), and the ones in the clubhouses were reputed to be of minimal candelas. At least, I don't think he was talking about my IQ.
And then we remembered the badge we inherited from Obscure Cousin Margaret... clearly someone in the family was in the Toc House League of Women Helpers, ie giving tea to our brave chaps etc.
Anyway, he had left the house before I was even out of bed, that's how keen he was to get to his hospital appointment. And I got a lift to school from Pops, does it get any better.

Grandad got a cab home eventually and as you can see, international super-model looks run in the family.
In Cubs we all got Creative badges for making a paper aeroplane and a towel made of newspaper.
Then we discussed what we'd found at the seafront and whatsisface was the winner with a very creditable speech about ambergris.
Then we looked at the stars and talked about how they'd moved since the pyramids were built.

The Expected Grandfather

Another slow start to the day, after the busy schedule yesterday. I started to construct the Lego and Lego-alike Marina Madness (comes with 2 sharks!) and eventually he said let's go to the seafront and see what's been washed up this time.
It was indeed windy and the road was closed in 2 places and even some of the promenade was fenced off with 'Footpath closed' signs up but everyone ignored it, especially us.
We found a metal pole, might have fallen off the pier as it gradually disintegrates through neglect. Some kids had lined up some rocks so I extended it for them. We discovered pulverized crabs, desiccated starfishes, dead pigeons, drifts of mussels, random branches, a selection of yard-long sections of hosepipe, a brave kite-surfer, shoes, bathroom sealant tubes, the beach all over the road again and 10-foot lengths of wood that used to be anti-sea barriers. We piled them up and made a see-saw. Once we'd both got wet, we finished up with 2 hours of fresh air getting blown into us.
Later, Grandad arrived on a sleepover. He is having a checkup (yes, from the neckup) at the hospital where I beamed down to this planet so it's only fair.

My 7th Birthday Party

It started with a huff. I find it easy to mutate into a Sulkatron, reasons not given.
But I didn't have time for much because Harry's party was at 11. We were second there and Jof had made me a massive bag of spare clothes for the weather looked awful. It cleared up immediately and by the time it started hailing we'd finished the footballing and were waiting for our chicken McMorsels. Harry and Ben were on my team at Playfootball (attached to ROKO gym) and we won 6-4. Ben got kicked in the teeth but none fell out. I got an award for great defending which is when the ball hit me and bounced off, I ended up in the net but the ball didn't.
Still, the party was great and predominantly made up of schoolfriends. After an afternoon's rest (I didn't want to go hunting dead bodies on the storm-ravaged seafront) it was time for my 7th birthday party. In fact, it was probably only my 4th or 5th as I really didn't have a party as a baby, but what I meant was, I didn't have one last year so this one was double-sized, a joint party with my younger self. After when I will have already invented a time machine soon, tense malformations like that will become commonplace.
We got in early and I counted them in as they arrived. There were not enough, but that just meant extra goes on the bouncy castle thing for all of us. Many party attendees were schoolfriends from the earlier Harry Party, all aggregated and coalesced around a faithful core of Puddlers. The party host bloke took us in and we raced into the pool and commandeered the floats and went roundandroundandround on the giant inflatable. It was distinctly longer than the one at the Mountbatten Centre but not as tall. PopsDad and Bud and Kate-Lynnsmum and Jof were the only adults in the pool with us and only Bud managed to get across the inflatable, but all of us did it lots.
Baby Edwardos joined in with gusto and it was a bangin' time, yea verily forsooth gadzooks.
Eventually we had to vacate and all us chaps got changed but not before we'd all done the naked willy dance where you jump around pointing at it and not getting dressed.
The girls were ready before us but then they all had to line up and dry their hair so technically we won, but then Johnny had to dry his lengthy tresses so actually we lost. In the party room (dance studio, with wall-length mirrors) we had chicken McMorsels and soss and fishcakes and chips and juice and ice cream and when the food ran out we all left the room and wandered the empty corridors 'investigating' and going in the janitor's cupboards and Erin said the toilets were spooky because a ceiling tile was missing and we only went back when the magic word 'Cake' was mentioned.
They all sang happy birthday and Jof lit the cake-sparkler second time lucky and we were all pink in the face and I gave out the party bags and it was funny.
We gave Gene Kelly a lift home and he suffers from rampant nominative determinism because he really is a very good dancer. I got lots of excellent presents and it was a very busy day. Splendid books various competed for my nocturnal reading and I got 2 Lego items and I get to open the Lego Minifigures from the unused Party Bags and can I stop yawning please it's really getting in the waaaahhh snore

Ragnarok! (again)

Slightly breezy this morning, the chimneys and ventilator fans were woo-ing and clacking all night.
Anyway, news finally reaches me that the world is going to end again. I totally missed the Y2K debacle in which aeroplanes fell from the sky and confused computers fired nuclear warheads at each other. Armageddon due to the end of the Mayan calendar on 21 December 2012 was nice because we had Elizabeth's housewarming party, and the world hardly ended at all. Although there have been at least 15 similar predictions of rapture since I migrated to this planet, none have quite worked out.
But now we have ... Ragnarok! This Viking end-of-days escapade involves hammers, trumpets, battles, busty wenches and beer, because those splendid Scandinavians were always party chaps. Odin gets busy with the old battleaxe and it all goes nipples-skyward. I know all about this sort of thing because Odin and Thor and Loki and all their mates regularly get busy on my cartoon show, in a manly and heroic way.


I got dem nobody coming to my party blues

Well blow me sideways with a Sochi Olympics snowblower, but the 22nd of February just so happens to be the next PuddleDaddies' Beer Festival! There'll be hammers, and strumpets, and battles, and beers, and hookers, and blackjack....
I won a merit certificate today for my joined-up handwriting. And then 2 more kids rang to say they weren't coming to my party. What, has jumping off a bouncy castle into a swimming pool gone out of fashion, then?
The swimming teacher says I'm close to getting to the next level, just need to work on my breathing, legs, front crawl and diving, and I'll be there. Bud got me 2 new Lego Minifigures, from series M (not a numbered series, but from the oft-anticipated Lego Movie). I got the Telephone Repairman and the Seagull Manager (one who flies in from nowhere, poos all over everything, makes a lot of noise and flies off again).

Washout? Then have a Blowout

Slightly damp all day and we laughed at the lake in the park. This is the one that overflows onto the road, the rivulets are on the left.
Of course, it stopped when school finished but the park was more sea than grass and my wetsuit doesn't fit any more and Mrs JB kindly offered to take me round to theirs for Match Attax! and Lego, because I never get any of that here.
Not everyone was having a good time, 3 Fire & Rescue vehicles screamed past just while I was getting my shoes on.
So Bob and Ben and Johnny and I took it in turns to play Glider of Death on the Wii and the highest anyone scored was 1.
This is because it's much more fun to crash the glider and I went in a volcano and crashed into the lava! But we found 3 more undiscovered islands and hit many floating bubbles which is the aim of the game. Then there was a tussle over pole position and a plate was crunched but they do that after every meal in Greece, and they're in a terminal recession so they can't be that expensive.
I was also given many free Match Attax! cards which seems to happen a lot, must give some back sometime. Then we picked Jof up and went to Wilko for party-bag stuff and I ran off again and hid in soft furnishings. OK so it's smaller than the West Kway Centre in Southampton but they didn't seem happy.

Schnapps, Crackling and Pops

The lakes in the park are filling up again, OK it's not the Somerset Levels, but certainly the Dead Sea as the grass and tree roots drown and moulder. The park actually overflows across the pavement into the road by the gate I use to get to school.
Today I finally got my Pops, she picked me up on the way in and we forcefully reminded her mother of her afternoon appointment at my house, and talked about balls and knockers. On the way home, we missed a massive rainbow by 10 minutes, a shame about the photo-opportunity but at least we were not likened unto Leprechauns.
We battled home against the wind, the air smelled of sea and I said there was seaweed in the air and he said look out it might rain winkles so we ran home.
I showed her my impressive Lego erection and we gave up trying to sort Match Attax! cards and made a den instead. To be honest, apart from pretending to be dogs, home-making has been our favourite activity since we first met.
We emptied all the Lego boxes and used everything that wasn't nailed down to trash the room, carnage as usual.
After supper (which included chocolate ice cream) she went home and I was given the good news: tidying my room was my job alone.

Badge 4, Lookensgepeepers

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See your App-tometrist for details.
Tuesdays are days of confusion so playing kiss-chase with Erin and Harry and Ben was a nice change. Us boys planned escape moves and hid and did run-by attacks and all managed to come away unkissed. Bud says don't try quite so hard and give it time.
My new guitar homework is Yankee Doodle, doesn't sound quite as funny as you clang away on the fretboard. Yesterday I did practice which is singing the song I wrote, the Give me Money song.
"Give me the munneyyy, I need the munneyy, I deserve mo' munneyyy...." At least I'm being honest about selling out early.
At Gymnastics we had to sit on each other to stretch muscles. I have been paired up with a girl of similar weight ie not much and we enjoy sitting on each other. It was much more painful when the teacher sat on me. At the end I was presented with my Badge 4, but 2 students are leaving us. One is returning to his home country which is China, I think, because his name is Rufus. The other has too many activities, I think he ran out of Daddy-Taxi miles.

Coming Unstuck

Clarke got triple detention today! I didn't know there was such a thing. Perhaps if he rugby-tackles Harry to get the football again, he might actually get punished!
Anyway, I was doing show'n'tell about the Eiffel Tower that I'd left at home and Miss M said O who are you then, don't recognise you with yer fancy hairdo, and Erin shouted out "It's Code 3!" and I had to explain about getting lost in West Quay shopping centre.
Little do I know it's an evil capitalist plot to imbue me with enough life-experience and caution to avoid it happening for real.
Stopped off to get some more glue, it says solvent abuse can kill so we told the glue it was a stupid poo-head that we hated and it didn't kill us at all.
Ben came round to discuss football cards and suggested I stick my fingers in my cheeks and make a grin like the Joker and then say "Bucking". Well, you can't speak properly like that, it's a wonder Batman ever understood him, and it came out phucking, which is pointless 'cos it's not a word.
Then at Cubs our teams competed to make the most stable tower out of newspaper to hold up an egg and his team won. The same 2 Scouts that were fund-raising at the Awards ceremony have challenged us to get as many 20p coins as we can into a tube of Smarties, best wins a prize. OK so we all worked out that you can get more in if you eat the Smarties but I wonder if we'll get the 20p coins back again.

Lego Metropolis: the Keys to my Success

Did not feel the need to get up early today. Or get dressed at any point. Leaving the house is for softies, nothing wrong with pyjamas.
Jof phoned to say she was shopping, and the Leader of the Free Council (the chap that awarded me my Bronze Scout award) popped by, but other than that not much: I unscrewed some more keyboards and we built Lego. The project of the moment is to build such a tall tower for the Lego Citadel that we run out of bricks. We succeeded (a milestone in itself), but the Lego Museum that was due to go on top of it cannot, it'd nearly hit the ceiling so we've had to rethink it.
There was an insanely low tide this afternoon with sandflats exposed in front of King Henry the 8ths' castle. You could walk out to the end of South Parade Pier if you didn't mind wet feet.
Later I pestered Jof and voluntarily put together a report on France with pictures and factoids.
Incidentally, Ciao Italia.

Mungle Ton: Code 3 in Scum Ton

Southampton is a big dirty sprawling city only 25 miles up the coast from us. They have things in their historical record like "In 1202 King John gave £100 to strengthen city walls against invaders", and quite a lot of it is still there, but their castle has been demolished.
Due to dock-workers strike-breaking a generation ago, Portsmouth and Southampton call each other Scummers and our respective football teams have always enjoyed throwing half-bricks and humorous sing-songs at each other. Harvey the Haircut in my class loves Scumton and it is a love that dare not speak its name I can tell you, so we didn't wear our Pompey hats today.
We said goodbye to Jof (visiting Nanna) and caught the train as planned and I couldn't believe the place names, Swanwick must be full of swans, Burbledon, Woolston, Saint Dennis... but he'd bought me a Lego Minifigure so all was not mad. It was windy. I expect the Jurassic coast where we found ammonites has been thoroughly eroded.
We found John Lewis in the giant indoor West Quay centre (Pronounced west kway) and I got a Lego train track pack with 2 changeable points junctions and a packet of hankies because I seem to be sneezing a bit. The interior is very large and impressive with many escalators and glass lifts and I enjoyed going off on my own with target meeting points and it all went fine.
Above Bar road is nice, clean and expensive, Below Bar is ... below par. But I did buy some bath fizzers. The 'Bar' is the Bargate, small castle-type thing that was the front door of the town and you can see the bits of old medieval wall sticking out.
We went back to West Kway and had a piggy lunch in Pizza Hut for a change. I like the salad bowls, for I can fill up while waiting for the pizza. The post-prandial walkabout was due to end at the lifts in the corner, because the waiter said we could see the Odeon cinema from there and I wanted to watch Somebody or Other and Mr Peabody, who is a time-travelling dog.

Well as you know, there were many escalators and lifts and levels and sub-levels and it had got quite busy and I rather forgot the mustering point in all the exitement, so I retraced the footsteps I might possibly have made but you can never be sure and I didn't hear either of the giant tannoy announcements asking me to contact security and just as I was waiting for a lift a nice chap in a suit asked me if I was Max and simultaneously Bud had targeted me from the balcony where the head of security and his 25 helpers (some you see, some you don't) had designated me a Code 3 (Lost Child) and goodness me I was pleased to see him and the manager gave me a little wave and we ran away in embarrassment.
We never did find the Odeon, it was too windy and rainy and we went in the charity shop where Grandma's clothes and dressing table went and then we found Houndswell Park.
This playpark is located in the large green area that they have kindly kept open. It's quite advanced and separate from the skatepark and teenager-loitering park and it's predominantly wooden.
It has a: Nessie monster, sandpark, Titanic frame with 3 floors and the top one looks quite like Johnny and Bobert's Hovercraft, Pirate ship with rope net and crow's nest, rope walkway, rubberized flooring, musical clangers, hammocks, hand-operated conveyor belt, see-saw and 2 roundabouts.
I stayed for ages even though I had previously complained about tired feet, mostly because of the sand excavator. I made a massive pile called Mount Sandalous, in memory of the sandy scandal we don't talk about.
On the way home we found 'The Southampton Barbershop' where we asked the man to make me cool. Sadly I admitted straight away that I was from Pompey but he shaved 'Scum' into the back of my head hardly at all. I think I deflected him by saying I supported Man U and Liverpool.
It got dark on the train back, so I practised going cross-eyed, as you do, not many places to hide on a train if the toilet's out of order. By the time we'd got back, 4 more Lego Minifigures had magically appeared but it didn't stop me fighting him, probably the sugar rush off the packet of Haribo Starmix I bought.
Time out of house: 9 hours. Money found: 12 pence. Repressed memories: 1. Lego gained: 6. Coolness ratio: 7.
Jof rang to check up on me, and it was like, whassup, k, whatever, dudess.