Guerilla Gardening

I was a perfectly behaved child this morning because when I finally woke up, I started reading instead of making noise etc.
I had breakfast in the supermarket again but the whole place was heaving and I had a 20 minute wait for my food so Jof bought me 2 more books, easy money. We are decorating the brass cannon shells but you can't get baubles big enough for the massive ones so Jof said let's put festive twigs in them, Bud was quite scathing about this idea but it turned out to be quite good so we bought 3 sprigs of twigs and now we no longer have ordinary ordnance.
2 years ago, I collected conkers, as every good boy does. This time, instead of trying to plant them out on the common (which didn't work last time), we selected only the very largest and planted them in big pots in the back yard. This is completely unsustainable because they get big quickly and we planted far too many and all the other conkers we threw in the bottom of the pots for compost sprouted anyway and we had about 70 trees. Even the Xmas nuts from last year that we planted just for fun came up and we had half a dozen nut trees taller than me and that was after only 1 year.
So we knew they had to be planted out, for every sapling is sacred, and we know a song about that, don't we, children. So he said let's go and plant them on the common opposite Bens' house and I said can I play with Ben and Jof sorted it and all I had to do was walk across the road after planting out the trees and it would all work out.
On the way we discussed what pattern to plant them in, for it is an opportunity to be naughty little boys.
An X would be quite easy to do. A circle would be more difficult, the ground is uneven and you'd be unlikely to meet up with the trees you planted earlier. An M would be better, but ditto for difficulty. But the obvious one was a willy. After a few decades, the willy made of horse chestnut trees would be visible from space, depending on how often Google Earth update their imagery. But we opted for a simple straight line, and he dug and I installed the baby trees and we moved across the face of the earth leaving a trail of trees marching across the landscape. At one point we met a boggy area and brambles so we simply turned left and left another line of trees marching away into the distance. Maybe most of them will get eaten by foxes or trampled by wildebeest but at least we tried.
Then Robert jogged past us and I went to Bens' house and set off the singing Darth Vader lots and found the plastic microphone and sang merry songs of madness to each other for ages.

Paying Respects

Jof was at work today so we made up some tasks to keep ourselves busy.

So the first thing we thought of was to go and see Grandad because Grandma died a year ago tomorrow and he was making the pilgrimage back to the old medieval village they chose to retire to for 25 years.

Now he has a fireplace that is in fact about the same size as the last one but about 500 years older, gotta love that Elizabethan brickwork.

He gave us a sackful of Xmas and birthday presents which makes all the difference given that I have already been told that all I will get for festive donations is an orange.

He was due to go and meet some old golfing friend but through the kindness of his heart he agreed to change his plans (change is bad) and fit in with ours by driving down the same road to the Botany Bay Inne which is basically a pub with abundant parking facilities on the way to Dorchester and we met there and he had Whitebait and we had the carvery and we all laughed and felt just like Good Old Team M again, which is 3 blokes spread across 9 decades but all suspiciously similar in terms of madness and length of hair.

Then we split and he went off to Crewkerne while we navigated the newly resurfaced back turnpikes of Upper Dorset to Lillington, and found Grandma in the tranquil historic lichen-encrusted churchyard.

I placed the pot of assorted plants upon her and she didn't complain because she's quiet nowadays. Then we checked out some of the older gravestones at their various rakish angles, some with little surround-fences and some without, but the older the plot, the less was legible due to lichen, weathering and illiterate stonemasons, you know the way it is. I've been up that tower lots of times, but it was closed today.
Then we drove back through that medieval village (population 26, not including horses) and saw the old house, practically unchanged apart from the cut-back hedges, and grooved on through to the other side. On Gordon's Lane we met 2 male yearling pheasants, splendidly coloured but as clever as teabags, we had to get out of the car to push them to the side of the road to avoid killing the poor little morons.
I have been reading solidly while in the car and somewhere near Bishop's Caundle I finished Harry Potter 2. Luckily, HP 3 was on the back seat. But then we met Sturminster Newton.
We do not go that way normally, but Bud had bought yet another brass shell casing off some crowd in the middle of nowhere so we had to stop and pick it up, and lo, it was taller than the 75mm Sherman Tank round and it polished up nicely. So we enjoyed the deep deep quite whiffy countryside and the way that they do take care of their little people by building some very decent swingparks and we did 2 of them.
Un-named park had a very nice wooden frame with metal tube slide and the War Memorial Park had a snake-like bench and a well-oiled roundabout.
Then we took the long and winding road back through the sleepy metropolitan conurbations of Shillingstone and Spetisbury and made Jof a cup of well-deserved tea, and watched the Harry Potter + Chamber of Secrets film because I had finished the book. This book + DVD deal is really working out for me.

Space Cake Ships. Spaceship Cakes. Did I just say that?

In school today we got a visit from a Brownie. No, not a special student party cake but a Girl Guide Brownie which is like a Cub Scout but a girl. And not like any of the perfectly good girls we've got in our Cub Scout section, more like, er, well, I don't know, just different, but the same age.
She told us that she'd been making brownies and I shouted out "O so you've been cooking each other" and the whole class laughed, for I am a comedian. But then she said yes, it was indeed the special student party cake and she explained about dripping the melted chocolate on and not letting it sag in the middle, bit of a sore point in brownie-making apparently.
Remember the ships auction from yesterday? Well, just to prove that I WAS there and I DID try, here's a screenshot from this morning when I was highest bidder for 3 hours. Then, of course, the big boys with the real money woke up and HMS Fearless (Lot 1) finally went for £1450, taking into account that you still have to add the buyer's premium (auctioneer fees) of 15.5% and VAT (sales tax) at 20%.

Too rich for my blood. It was a crying shame to see the 4.2 metre aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious go for £1149, but there you go, some went for over £3000. OK, so I could have bought several. But could I justify it?
In swimming I got my first ever nosebleed when Connor kicked me in the face. Now, I may not be a rough'n'tumble footballer like Ben or Harry but to go this long without a nosebleed is an achievement. I was so proud.

A Ship too Far

You know every now and then, an opportunity comes up and you either have the money or you don't, and you either have the chutzpah to take it or you don't? Like the decommissioning of all the old red phone boxes in the 1990s, when you could practically take away these listed buildings for free if you had a truck, and within years they were a priceless novelty bought by individuals and hotel foyers alike?
Have a look at the Peaker Pattinson online auction and their QinetiQ sale. 17 craftsman-built 1/50th scale unique copper display models of British warships and assorted naval vessels are being sold off by the defence contractor. Type 42 destroyers, aircraft carriers, frigates and the Royal Yacht Britannia could be yours! These items are quite big, though, 60 kg or so and ten foot long.
I was going to buy one or 2 and lend them to Elizabeths' Mum at her ship museum and get my name in the papers again - plucky pipsqueak saves imperial jewel for grateful nation - but overnight the bid prices have gone up from £60 to £870 so I don't think I'll bother. But if YOU are a ship-mad collector, Manchester United football team, Qatari billionaire or Naval museum then maybe you could try and secure HMS Illustrious, Campbeltown, Invincible or Birmingham.
Today at school Jof asked me to "drop off a bag of sugar" to her contact in the staff room, I can see a glittering future for me as a drugs mule. This sackful of sugar sachets has been languishing in a cupboard at her work for some time, maybe even from before the time when EU rules on arsenic contamination were tightened.
Then I split yet another pair of trousers, in the exposed peanuts area, and I was sitting down at the time, honest. I had to go home in my PE shorts.
Todays' job was to collect some cacti from Dear Followers Martin and Zoe. They have been looking after them for ages and their new house won't have space so we secured them to the back seat of the car with 2 seatbelts and only got prickled several times. They really are frighteningly spiny.

A Digital Orange for Xmas

I already know I'm getting practically nothing for Xmas and birthday, Bud says that to honour people of Nanna's generation, I shall get an orange, because back then kids thought themselves lucky if they got an orange, because they'd never seen one before. I just hope I get a digital one, rather than one of those old-fashioned clockwork oranges.
Started to get some replies to my party invites and took Ben home. It was still raining so we elected to stay in and Lego and Film and Stuff Our Faces.
Ben said he's seen the Blues Brothers which is boring apart from the car crash so we chose True Lies as a film of equivalent age label but with much more laughter. So we sat and farted all afternoon while clambering over each other, quacking, arguing and occasionally watching.
We'd not got half way through when we were sent upstairs for play-fighting and proceeded to wreck my room.
I find it most unfair that we can jointly trash my room but only I have to clean it up so I persuaded Jof to do it for me by crying. Then we all watched Harry Potter 1 which is quite long and we all had stiff bottoms by the end.

Crazy Paving ain't all it's cracked up to be

Today one of my few Xmas presents has arrived, the Harry Potter DVD box set. I feel safe in the knowledge that it is my reward for reading all seven HP books, and blissfully unaware that my reward for having read all 7 books is ... to have read 7 books. I really must get some nicer parents.
I handed out all the leftover party invitations and half the class said they wanted to come as well, apart from the twins who said they can't swim.
In another leisure time earning task, I finished my maths homework so I could Minecraft. This entails watching a Youtube video of someone building components of a sandstone mansion and copying their every move onto my tablet. What I really need is 73 hours in a day, with possibly as many as 5 set aside for sleep.
In gymnastics I sustained multiple head injuries again because of limited tumbling skills and weak arms which collapse my wave function just when I'm vertical.

Ready Steady Cook

Recently I've got back into cooking programmes because sometimes that's all Jof will let me watch. So at suppertime I sometimes say that I like the contrasting textures of the signature dish and that it could use a few more croutons.
Today I got Top Banana which is not a squishy fruit superhero but the award for accelerated reading, earned for ploughing my way through Harry Potter 1 and making substantial inroads into HP 2. I didn't know Smarties came in such a big tube outside of the duty-free shop.
In Cubs we learned that carbon monoxide is a colourless odourless undetectable poison, how to detect a fire behind a closed door and that if you find a gas leak you have to turn off the water supply. We also did Dangers In The Home which is like the Dangers In The Bedroom we did in Beavers, this time I suggested knives and stabbing weapons but I didn't do it in the Terminator voice so nobody picked up on it.

It's Life, Gym, but not as we know it

Struggled awake tennish for a boiled egg and mango chunks, as you do.
There was pretty well only 1 thing to do today and that was Dilly's party at the gymnastics centre. Jof dropped us off and went shopping and we were almost the first ones there, Dilly was late to her own party!
Because both Dilly and I gym there anyway, the list of attendees (Genevieve, Olivia, Siena, Daniel, Oliver, Flynn inter alia) was strong on gymnasts and 2 of us actually wore the shirt. It was also strong on familiar faces from my old school and so it was just like old times as we screamed at each other and told Bud to take his glasses off so we could beat him up.
We had the whole place to ourselves and we trampolined, ran around and generally got all pink-faced with exertion. The foam pits are ace for throwing each other in and having swordfights and stuff. I always make a den under the parallel bars support by removing all the foam, this time Adam and I ganged up on Eva, seen here retreating.
At the food time we gathered in one loud and noxious conglomeration and grabbed sweetmeats and small chop* galore.
They had a chocolate fountain which is a 3-level aluminium self-heating pot that continuously overflows with melted chocolate so you put strawberries and marshmallows on a fork and dip it in and wait for the chocolate to solidify and it goes everywhere but particularly all over your face. Some people put 4 marshmallows on at once!
But all too soon we had to go and Jof had bought some epic red baubles of 80 mm diameter so we filled a couple more of our artillery shells with xmas cheer, and Jof let me watch Last Action Hero. Then he said that I had to clean myself so much in the shower he could eat his dinner off me, which is something they do in Japan, apparently.
* 'Small chop' is west African for finger food.

Load of old Baubles

Up at 10, because I'm worth it. I chose tuna pasta for breakfast, because I'm normal. Dragged round the shops because I'm a kid.
Actually, I didn't mind that, because I got 2 Lego items in John Lewis but they didn't have any of the Xmas trees we wanted in stock and we had to order it online anyway, much more boring. Saw Erin's car in the Waitrose car park and I wanted to put a ticket on it saying £100 fine for parking here but it had gone by the time we got back.

Jof went out again for a magnum of bubbly for the PuddleMummies so I chose "Total Recall" as my Saturday movie. Then I went into the loft and got down the Xmas box and arranged the baubles and leftover crackers and stuff all over the dining room table and ditched half of it and Jof got home and ditched some more.
We have chosen an 8 foot tree so got rid of the old tired embarrassing stuff like the joyous plastic reindeer and the bits of tinsel that were only 6 inches long and the baubles where there was only 1 left and suchlike. The red baubles fit really well on our collection of old artillery shells, just making use of the things around us. Then I demanded that everyone stopped their activities to play Risk: I managed 20 minutes before announcing that I was going to watch TV. Then a further 30 minutes before I opted for Minecraft.
Why am I being shouted at?

It's a Deal, It's a Steel

Hooray for Friday!
This week is Anti-bullying Week as well as Hero Week so I was part of a group of 12 who did 'Anti-Bullying' in big letters and made up poems for each letter and presented them to the whole school, which does not have any bullies in it, apart from the big lump of stupidity (IQ 74) in my class but they don't talk about him because that would mean admitting it.
Our 'My Hero' posters were put up and everyone gathered around my one of Arnold Schwarzenegger and did poses and went Raarg and one guy took his shirt off to emulate Arnie. Other heroes are My Dad, and various footballers.
Got the party invitations through the post, now all we have to do is find out people's real names so we don't have to put things like "Archie Football" on the invite.
On the way home we saw some builders renovating a house like we did with ours, opening up the kitchen by removing a wall and inserting a sturdy steel support. But their steel was hilarious, about 17 foot long and takes 8 men to lift. We looked at the house when it was on sale, smaller than ours but on the main bus route overlooking the park. Erin is going to get the builders in to open up her kitchen soon, I wonder how big her steel will be.
You know the thing when you just have to come back from a night out painting the town red and you've got a Policeman's helmet and a traffic cone ... well, challenge is up for anyone to steal a 600 kilo steel
just saying