Selling the Family Silver

Goodness me, I didn't stop today, apart from all those rests.
First we drove to the Scouts lock-up and took out all 9 giant water butts and the scrap aluminium and some rusty saws and broken cooking utensils and dead car batteries. We also donated our Camouflage net because it did its job at New Year's Eve and it'd probably get more use by camping Scouts than sitting in our loft. It's useful to have a longer-than-average car to fit all this stuff in.
I got my time on the computer while Bud washed out all the water butts because they have to keep a whole campsite supplied with water, beer etc.
After a surprising fishcake lunch we drove to an industrial estate full of lorries and met a man about a dog, or actually about the scrap aluminium. He took the ironware and batteries as well which saved us a trip to the tip and gave us a cheque for £15 payable to the Scouts and he did it all on the books but when Viktor arrived and asked apropos of nothing if he could have £100 in fivers, the boss took out a wallet like a half-brick and exposed his giant wedge, from which he peeled 20 fivers which didn't appear to reduce it in size at all.
That left us lighter in weight and we negotiated the lorry slalom and dropped off a bag at the charity shop and found 'Horizones'. This is the soft play area in Havant Leisure Centre which was originally brought to our attention by Ben and we'd had a birthday party or 2 there and I was there only 3 days ago with Jof, in the pool.
There were only about 20 kids there so I chased Bud around and some of them were having a ball-pit-ball slinging match and I'm just not as thuggy as the local kids so made myself scarce.
After 2 hot hours we drove to B+Q and looked for bow saws (not good enough) and bamboo (acceptably priced at £4) so half a victory at least.
I still had to do scheduled swimming and when we returned we said hello to Jof and went right back out again for my evening run and we had sausages.

Nyaaaart Hootle Blart

For one of my days out I chose the 11 1/2 mile bike ride via Fareham. We checked in on Poppy to see if she wanted to come with us but her sister's boyfriend was looking after the house in his dressing gown and said she was visiting grandparents.
It sounds a long distance but with all the swing-park rest stops, train and ferry transfers and lunch break, it really isn't that bad. The third train took us to Fareham which wouldn't normally be interesting without the defunct railway line to Gosport which is now a bus route and bike path.
We'd planned to take our shirts off but the keen breeze never made it feasible but at least it was sunny. One thing I like doing is big sine-wave curves on the bus route because you can see buses coming from miles away but I didn't actually check before crossing the road and a bus blarted me.
Later some cop cars screamed past us at 90, I guess they're allowed to use the bus route as well. I also found a large potato at the side of the road, it's the little things you remember.

First Swing-park is Bridgemary. I assaulted the assault course, of course, and ended up playing some kind of chase game with some younger girls while Bud found a really long stick to help some local youths get their green boomerang out of a tree.
The next park is by Gosport Leisure Centre and ice rink, it too has an assault course but is quite small. It is the parkly precursor to lunch at the Sailmaker Carvery which also has a swingpark in the back garden.
I filled up on big lumps of meat and we cycled on through the green tunnel which I don't like so much because we met wasps there last autumn on a blackberry-fest. Leesland Park has a lot of open space and some loud youths who have a great future in the welfare industry but a very good wooden play fort and a decent zipline: mostly by now I was wondering why there was so much hooting going on.

Sea fog was making its way inland and we could hear foghorns aplenty.
Nearby is Broken Park but it seemed to be repaired, not that we stopped to see as I needed the toilet again, as is usual by this time on the journey. I hastened to Morrisons where I crashed into a parked car in my haste.
Cockle Pond playpark was mistily obscured and I was glad I'd brought my top as it was suddenly cold and the air was full of moo-ings of all octaves as the orchestra of foghorns competed for dominance of the harbour entrance.
I still used all the exercise equipment but got batted by the spinning things on the roundabout so we grumped to the ferry and waited ages for the captain to get the nerve up to cross the water.
As if by magic, the air cleared as we reached civilisation and I was happily cycling through old Portsmouth to go and say hello to Jof when my foot missed the pedal and I crashed to the ground in the middle of the road and some old bloke behind me kindly didn't run me over.
But I'd scratched my hand and bumped my knee and shattered the left brake handle so we limped back home at slow speed, with severe loss of confidence and 1 working brake, using only pavements.
The man in the bike repair shop said it'd be £12 to replace.
Later, some Yellow Politicians came to our door and said vote for us, not those Blue guys, they're sneezebuckets.
Half an hour later, some Blue Politicians came to our door and said I hope you're not going to vote for those Yellow Poo-brains, looks like we hold the balance of national power, as I deserve.

Points Failure

Waiting on the station platform for obscure Cousin Margaret, we could tell the trains were having trouble. A points failure at main station 'Ford' led to compound difficulties for the whole south coast.
The female automated system with the silly accent kept telling us Platform 3 for the delayed 0954 to Poitsmouth but was then over-ruled by the emergency system which said Platform Change, the train will now depart from Platform 2, both disagreed with the LED scoreboard thing which said train cancelled and in the end they switched them all off and a train lady stood on the platform and shouted at us.
Margaret didn't arrive on any of the trains on any platform coming from any location so we nipped home to phone her house in case she'd got the wrong day and I picked up a Harry Potter book.
I'd barely started reading when one of the delayed rescheduled replacement trains gave us a Margaret only 40 minutes late, and as we left, we noticed a third policeman arriving, it's as if they were expecting trouble.
Anyway, Margaret did the tour of the house to see what had changed in the last 2 years and then we drove to the seafront and looked at all the big houses and I climbed in Canoe Lake Swingpark for ages.
Lunch was at the recently refurbished Tenth Hole golf café where we had to queue up and we checked out the Rose Garden in the lovely sun and I spent ages in the sandpit and had ice creams and it was quite busy. I sneeze a lot because of hay fever but I don't want to take a tablet.
After my afternoon run (twice round the park, much easier) we viewed the scouts kit repository and took over ownership. It is a garage surrounded by dried dog poo and it was full of stuff with complicated names and we're going to struggle, because if they ask to borrow a NATO Tilley Spider Toggle, we're not going to know what it is, or where it is. Oh dear.

Barely Regal

My promised land for the day was Havant Leisure Centre which has had its diving board repaired. There's nothing I like more than to frolic wetly with much diving so Jof and I drove to the place where I had my 7th birthday party.
Some teenage boys were taking turns to leap strangely from the board while being watched by some giggling girlies of unfortunate proportions so I waited for them to stop and went in a few times.
Once we were tired out we hit ErinsMum's favourite "Hobbycraft" and bought 30 quid's worth of mosaic chips, as you do. In 1978 Bud lived on the 7th floor of a tower block in Abu Dhabi near a tile shop and slowly but surely built up a collection of tiles (they fell out of the boxes, honest, m'Lud) and made a Mosiac. (Not a Mosaic, a Mosiac). Then could not understand why Grandma and Grandad did not place the alleged Mosiac in the cabin trunks to ship to the new house in Sharjah. Parents, who'd have them.
By then we were hungry so marched to the well-known Pizza Hut opposite Giant Tesco. It was gone, just a scar of gravel to show there was ever a prefabricated structure in the now vacant lot. Tesco café said they were just a coffee shop and did not supply the breakfast, lunch or dinner their placard advertised.
At this rate it was practically going to have to be MacDougalls again due to excessive ravenosity but then we saw a Burger King on the way and forced our way in for 'King Chicken Tumours instead of Chicken McMorsels. A close mechanically-recovered shave there, I think.
This sadly only gave me 1 3/4 hours to digest said 'King Poultry Tumours before my afternoon run and Bud worked me too hard and I got a double stitch and when I got back I burst into tears and there were recriminations and remonstrations. So we have agreed to a simpler smoother slower run on emptier tummies. I got large chocolate cake for reward, sorry, dessert.

Bugstorm: The Angry Club

Today was one of those rarest of occasions - a Bank holiday where it wasn't raining.
So we cycled to the seafront and climbed in Canoe Lake swingpark and the splashpark by the miniature village was open but I didn't go in and I met Macy from my school.
I judged myself young enough to use the 'Caterpillar' bouncy castle thing and on we rode to the pitch'n'putt by the D-Day museum. It said nobody under 10 on the playing area but we just pretended and nobody minded. The man in the shed gave us lots of golf sticks, far too many, in fact, for people who don't know which golf bat to use in any given situation.
But we dragged the armful of golf rackets round with us and Jof tried them all. Jof always has 3 swipes before she hits the ball and by the 3rd stroke she's angry enough to hit it properly, she particularly liked the 'angry club' which was some kind of greens putter with a big flat face and a hollowed-out bit at the back. Score 63.
My speciality is hitting the ground but I find that if you hit enough divots and clods and things, the ball makes its merry way towards the smooth bit with the flag. I also like to sneak up on the hole and spank it totally so it goes miles further away. Score 62.
Bud hits it reasonably but it always hits a tree or goes in a bush. Score 41. We also hit each others balls a few times like in billiards, but we never got it outside the fence. We deserved ice creams, and 2 of us took our shirts off.
Walking down to the beach by Henry's castle, we were attacked by billions of insects. Clouds of little green flies and long black flies and brown bugs and all their friends assaulted us and everybody else on the busy coastal path, half the world was there and all the roads were clogged so cycling was the correct move.
But the bugstorm was very annoying and everyone was waving their shirts and we ran away to the Blue Reef café because the fish and chip shop (Rock and Sole) had such a huge queue. The café had run out of almost everything and the Romanian Mrs Overalls served us very slowly but it was food. On the way back I found a £1 coin in the road.

The Arecibo Radio Message

Today nobody had to get up so we didn't. But eventually we saw it was a nice day. The windows were opened, the cacti moved to their summer location and I made my own breakfast.
But that was all a bit ambitious so we continued with the Lego Castle. We've done the niche colours: the Pink Tower is quite good but the Purple Tower is barely a stump. The Gatehouse was a double-width opportunity so is now a giant cartouche reminiscent of the Arecibo Radio message and its graphic representing the DNA double-helix.

Then I ran a mile. This is not a statement of fear, I did the same run round the park which is exactly a mile. I have negotiated that we will do this run 4 times, then move up to the Mad Hospital run (1.8 miles), that should teach me to be out of shape. Then he did his 10-mile run and I watched Toy Story 1+2. We started to populate the castle walls with humanoids which is always a delight because Johnny likes to pull all their heads off to make headless armies and Ben likes to make railways with heads on, and we have to rebuild them all to make them back into soldiers. And you thought I was twisted inside. Somehow pictures don't do it justice.
During supper my tooth fell out. I don't have scurvy, dropsy, Ebola or 1984, I'm just a growing boy.

Making a Drama out of a Crisis

Jof had to go to work (again?) so we resolutely failed to get up. But after strengthening myself with some scrambled chicken ovulations I went to my first real drama lesson! It was very quiet, it looked like we were the only people in the building until 2 girls turned up and the teacher bounced out, and that was our class, maybe I'll be able to get a word in.
For the first hour we did stage presence and exercises and then after tea break we made up our own play. Each group gets a decade to write about and we have the 1940s so we are child evacuees going to live in the countryside while the Luftwaffe tries to shoot down the train.
The girls made plane noises and I was a chattering machine gun which was handy because I make that noise all the time anyway. I am a legless chap like Eddie Murphy at the beginning of Trading Places due to a land mine so they will push me round on a little wheeled trolley. I took lots of notes and we have many ideas and if I get to be the lead role I'll be onstage for ages. The large amount of films in my memories proved a great source of inspiration.
After hours and hours of Minecraft I went for a run. This is something I agreed to while drunk, I think, but because my little tummy sticks out a bit and I've already entered the Great South Kiddie Run in October, I have to lose weight and gain fitness and apparently that's how the army do it. So we only went round the park a bit but I ran for 10 minutes, not including gaps for breathing. I also tried to renegotiate the whole way round but talking while running didn't work out so well for me.
Later I made spinach and Ricotta pasta for myself as part of the Cub Scout Getting-off-your-bottie-and-doing-stuff-for-yourself badge.

Oubliette; The Lego Crafting Table

I'm an ordinary man. A simple man am I ... but we all have our differences. So when they ask me what differentiates me from the common hoi polloi, I might very well say, what do I have in my bedroom that you may not have?
Well, for my 7th birthday, I got a dining table. Mildly strange, but there you go, a fully fledged expanding table with lathed and milled pedestal that we decorated with several Lego flats, making a playspace of immortality and infinite possibility, good for castles and so forth. Jof made food so we didn't need to leave the house all day.
We used the Crafting Table to create my current fantasy which is a physical version of my minecraft world. I am game-space controller and Bud was wall-builder and Jof did some brick-hunting and gradually the Lego bricks were colour sorted and we ran out of white and had to go on to black and then red and you've just gotta look forward to the towers which could be of any colour .... The Oubliette refers to a prison cell I've built into the outer curtain wall.
Sorry. Watched 'Coming to America' on TV so laughed myself to bed.

Easy as Cake! A Piece of Pie!

Yesterday when the lads came back to my gaffe we all bundled downstairs to see the cakey masterpiece that Jof and I had made, and tried to think of good excuses to eat it, like 'It was broken when we got there' and 'there were too many eggs on it anyway'.
Today we get to buy all the slices of cake to raise school funds for the benefit of us kids, so in fact we're helping ourselves by eating it.
So in school we had even more tests and we did some running around and the last half-hour of term was a free period so I watched Ben play a game where you have to evade capture and survive the onslaught of some zombie-type aggressors. As soon as I got my demob papers I ran to the assembly hall where the volunteer parents had set up the cake stalls.
Jof is a volunteer parent because she volunteers our help onto things like this.
Last time we were on KP we sold £20 pounds' worth of gloves and air fresheners to an unsuspecting public, against all expectations, srsly, it was the poisoned chalice job and we totally aced it.
There were so many cakes they had to go onto a second table and Bud cut and served the cakes in generous portions and I took the money, 50p per item. We had to warn people that the chicks and nests were not edible, and yet again saw the young lady (6) who bought so many air fresheners from us we had to say haven't you had enough, madam.
Once we'd got past the people proffering a £10 note for a single cupcake, we developed buckets of money in no time at all and by 4pm we'd sated a schoolful of greedy kids and their parents and I got to sit down with some brownies and an orange juice, for which I paid like everybody else. Our cake was consumed in entirety and by the end it was only the green one with grass clippings on and half of the blue and yellow doughnut left. These pictures of the same table are before and after the utter ravaging by sugar-mad hordes of parents. And their kids.
I hobbled home due to tired feet and regained the sofa, where I intend to hibernate for the bulk of the holiday period. Jof is also tired, but then again, she has to do real work.

Metre Readings

Our energy supplier asked us to read the meters. This is not something that would normally interest me but I can't help but notice, in poetic scansion, metre is measured in feet.
Anyway, we did even more tests at school including maths and literacy. It is called SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar). Ben said he got 12 on spelling but if his pencil hadn't broken and he hadn't been jogged twice, he would have got 18.
I have a new plan for my Lego Table, this time it is a castle with inner and outer curtain walls with bridge and portcullis. I also require a prison, exercise yard and guards.
Therefore Ben and I started on the boats.
On the way to the park we met the JBs waiting at the traffic lights, it's as if the adults have learned to read the time. We chased and climbed and were ably assisted in our noisy endeavours by Poppy and Edward, Eva and Flynn, LittleMax and Cosmo, CocoSister and Poppy III, Owen the Destroyer and some chunky chappie that nobody knew. LittleMax and I spent most of the time throwing an unopened bag of Haribo Gold Bears at some pigeons. For April Fuel (hoho) we had Jaffa cake bars and crisps.
But after only 45 minutes we went home and had 1 hour 20 building all the Lego accoutrements we could think of, particularly amphibious landing craft with sliding guns and armies of stormtroopers again.