It's Better to Burn out ...

Yet another pyjama day. I could seriously get used to this. Jof managed to call for a bacon sandwich in bed and some emergency chocolate fingers by noon but gave up at 2 and went back to bed.
That gave Bud and I the chance to eat pizza and watch Highlander again, there can be only one unless you watch it twice. I saw no need to get dressed and had to be told to read a book after 5 hours of Minecraft but at least I spent some time learning my Chimney Urchin lines. So for no other reason, here is a picture of the latest additions to my coin collection, thanks ebay.

A Random Owl

As a 9 year-old, I'm supposed to have a relatively simple life, but it doesn't seem to work out that way.
We parked in town (£1.50) and went to the shoe shop to get me some clumpy boots for my starring role as Chimney Sweep and I was just beating him up when he pulled my trousers down and I got angry. At the theatre the lady said no, I've got no record of the appointment for a fitting session you made over the phone but I'll squeeze you in. I put on my thermal undies behind a large wooden cow and stood there while they added more and more raggedy clothes until I was a fully-fledged Victorian street urchin.
The acting lesson itself was at the hotel again so we met Bertie and walked round there and we have some new starters and people on try-outs. Immediately afterwards we drove to coastal village Emsworth and it was farmer's market day so everywhere was packed and we had lunch in the Coal Exchange again and a lady had an owl and we talked about owls and how every owl claims to be Hedwig and they eat mice and and turn their heads all the way round because they can't swivel their eyes.
Emsworth has a long pond so we fed some ducks and swans with leftover ciabatta (only the best for them) and there were so many seagulls they scared off the moorhens.
At home we found the broadband and TV were cut off which was annoying and the JBs had left a message saying come round for a barbecue so we did that and Jof went out with her work friends.
We played jousting on the plastic motorbikes using oars and armour and watched a film and wrestled for ages with Elizabeth who is quite a fighter.
At home we watched Beverly Hills Cop and I turned off my light at 1123 but Jof didn't get back until 2.

A Brush with Destiny

They say the best prison is one in which the prisoner thinks he's free. And that jesus loves a sinner.
Jeez, gotta love this freedom.
Today we had our official photos taken at school and we all had to pass through the production line of teachers trying to make us look presentable. Jof had specially saved a clean shirt but that made no difference as we had to wear our sweaters. That's why I had to lend mine to 2 other people who hadn't brought theirs.
Our Beowulf newspapers are now up on the wall and mine is next to Bens' again. It's just so much more difficult to publish a hand-pencilled broadsheet than it is to publish a colourful magazine-style post. GIFs work, for a start.
You know in those old 'Top Gear' episodes where the terrible threesome have to pick a crap car for £1000 and drive it to a skittles competition in Andorra, or similar? Well, I'm sure Jeremy Clarkson always ended up with the Alfa Romeo and then went on about its cute personality failures, so for example you'd see him switch on the radio and the windscreen wipers would come on, and not go off again until he was past Bordeaux.
Well, a couple of years ago Jof bought our big long car and while she was busy paying, I was busy investigating all the little cubbyholes and pull-out flaps and secret lift-up compartments.
Today, the securing clip on the big secret compartment on the dashboard died, so the flap lifts up and doesn't click back down again. So you have to drive along with a big erect wing blocking your view. We glued it shut using old wood glue applied with a stick of pampas grass (what else?) and added a big cross of 3 inch brown tape to encourage it to close, gosh, we're mending our car with duck tape. How Redneck.
But possibly the best part of the day apart from Minecraft was the present that Bud had 'hidden' in my room. I have won a part as Senior (not Señor) Chimney-Sweep in the Victorian Festival of Christmas and already have the threadbare underclothes, and will get the ragged street urchin apparel tomorrow. So what fundamental item did I require? Yes, a Mary Poppins Sweeps' Brush off Ebay. I ought to learn to twiddle and brandish it, be a real pro.

Boy Meets Girl

I know you have many entertainment choices so I thank you for choosing Mungleton for your comedy needs.
The day started confusingly. Jof told me off for not getting her a birthday present, not even a card. From this I was able to deduce that it was a special day for her (news to me), although I thought that 39 was a low-key event.
Anyway, at school we did a lot of PE, which took up most of the day. One of the tasklets was football. Now, I am not a natural born footballer, nor do I possess dazzling ball skills or go out of my way to join in the playground matches, although I defend or go in goal if forced into it. I think the teacher knew this, and put me in a team of 3 with 2 girls, playing against a team of 3 girls.
This did not put me off, as I was now the best footballer on the pitch, hurrah! So while Lucy and her team were busy making inadvisably long passes to one another, I was able to nip in and steal it from them, scoring 3 of the 5 goals we posted, against their 1.
I found myself doing some epic teamwork with one of the girls on my team and afterwards she said that was rather good, do you want to be my boyfriend and I said why not, so that was sorted, nice to get that stage out of the way with minimum difficulty, don't know what the fuss is about.
Some bad news for Ben the real footballer is that Year 5 are banned from footballing for 2 whole weeks for arguing. This leaves Year 6 with the entire playground to themselves.
So after school we drove to the King's theatre where the DVD of my performance had finally arrived. I shall watch myself later.
We also nipped in to a very complicated chocolate shop and obtained a solid dark chocolate cat, some dark truffles (2 with pistachios), some coffee beans in dark chocolate and a slab of dark chocolate with nuts in it. They had all sorts of other stuff like Eiffel Towers, dogs, shoes, skulls, fish, frogs and monkeys all in handmade chocolate heaven. Then we visited Jof at her workplace and she came out and graciously accepted the choccy tribute and a hug with hardly any pointed comments about forgetting her birthday.
In B+Q we were proper chaps because we bought a small plumbing accessory without asking the assistant, found it didn't fit and mended the kitchen tap anyway by removing the washer.

Lego Ruminology

At school we did a mini spelling test and I got 100%. But then we did a decimals test and I got 0.3.
We studied War of the Worlds and saw a bit of footage of the interplanetary invasion and were asked to draw a scene and act it out musically in groups of 4: with Ben and Erin and Harry in my group we should win. I drew a tank shooting a bullet at one of the droids, but because we own a few High Explosive rounds such as the 20mm and the 37mm Pom Pom, I know about the button on the front of the projectile that sets it off and incorporated this detail into my sketch. This made it look suspiciously like the tank was shooting a giant willy at the Martian invader, bet they never thought of doing that.
Wednesday Park was OFF due to excessive weather so the Lego Room was open for business. Problem was, I was busy Minecrafting when the JBs arrived and it's just so difficult to escape the orbit of Planet Minecraft. Bob kept saying let's go and play Lego and I kept saying I've got to show you this bit first and look what happens if I try it in Survival mode and guess where I've put my waterfall etc but we did get all the Lego track out, and then go and play Hide'n'Seek.
We got an hour and a half of manic mayhem and it was still raining when they went.

Asset Strippers

Maybe I'll open a basement Pole Dancing club called Asset Strippers in Central London where all those hard-working bankers can go and dance with Poles (and Croatians).
At school we read Harry Potter 1 again, but I'm 3 books ahead. I was also given a flyer for drama classes but I can't spare the time as I'm on stage.
I am the "Class Reader". This is not like a barcode reader or an Adobe reader, just the star pupil who has read the most. I celebrated this by immediately going onto the Minecraft tablet for 2 hours the second I got home.
I gymnastics I am just about to be on the cusp of almost nearly achieving the next badge, honest. Then Jof wanted me to do some Viking homework, what do I employ these people for, FFS.

Normality is Relative

So, on paper at least, this week is the first normal week for ages. 5 days, all regular extra-curricular activities resuming, nothing added or taken away. Well, I do have a costume-measuring session booked before my acting class, where they will try and make me into the most well-presented, thermally insulated freelance Victorian Chimney Sweep, complete with Gorblimeys, rickets and pulmonary oedema due to repeated exposure to micron-sized soot particles.
In school we underwent a maths test so that Mr E could get an idea of how stupid we are. I got 3/12 and I was by no means the worst. We might have to go back to the old conkers-onna-string abacus.
While delivering some catering equipment to the Scouts lock-up, we nipped across the road to the nice garage that fixed the car for us last week. As you can see from their façade, steel beams are an integral part of their building so we gave them a stack of our super-magnets to say thank you (we did pay them as well).
But we were chased home by the weather, which is making up for accidentally giving us 3 hot days this year by starting the winter storms early.
In Cub Scouts we played Dodge-ball and I got a Camping badge, it's been months since Jof had something in her sewing queue. Cubs is a good crossover because there are people in my class and people from my old school.

The Nerf is Not Enough

Got up, played Minecraft. Forced into going shopping so stayed in the café and read Harry Potter rather than help shop. Jof got a Nerf Gun for the school fayre and I said I wanted it.
Watched Minecraft videos. Jof wanted me to help make my homework (Viking house) so I spludged the paint until she did it for me.
Played Minecraft. Jof demanded I do some housework in return for the Nerf Gun, I mean we are talking dusting here. So I realised I didn't value the Gun that much (not en-Nerf) and played Minecraft instead.
Here is what remains of the super-fancy chocolate Jof got from the highly hoity shop in Chichester, and here is one of the smaller coins I got from the Leprosy Mission yesterday. It has the special badge that was only issued in the 1930s and 1940s.

Your Mission, should you choose to infect it

Over the last 10 years, I have been collecting funny foreign coins. Not in a serious way, you understand, just cheap stuff at knock-down prices to keep as a novelty reminder of the past when we've all gone cash-free and we pay for things with a thumbprint.
Recently we found a 1 kg pot of coins in an antiques shop in Emsworth that had a sticker on from the Leprosy Mission of England and Wales. We don't do religion (so much as laugh at it) but when we looked at their website and found they were doing a coin and stamp fair only 12 miles north of our location, we had to go. I had a giant pot of duplicate coins for swapsies and basically it's just been sitting there doing nothing, so we thought why not donate that lot to the Mission, and buy some more at the same time.
So this morning we drove to Clanfield which is right by Buster Ancient Farm where I went on a school trip and we found Drift Road Evangelical Church and went in. In a small room, we found about 15 people intently sifting through huge boxes of stamps and postcards and thimbles and medals and matchboxes and banknotes and other vitally important ephemera like that.
I handed over my pot of coins (weighing six kg) and asked for our box back. Then I bought 2 one-kilogram boxes of random coins and on the table I found a set of reproduction Roman coins out of a museum shop and got them as well, to show off at school. We asked about the "50 coins from 50 countries" bag that we'd bought in Emsworth and he said it was actually an old cereal box offer, collect the coupons and get coins, from years ago.
Our business complete, the nice man said thank you for the approximately £50 his charity would make from our exchange and that it would help save people in hot countries from getting leprosy.
Then it was acting lessons and hey presto, I am a chimney sweep in the Festival of Christmas! I've got lots of lines to learn, but I can give you a sneak preview: Top of the morning to yer? Would you like your chimneys swept? Just sixpence for you kind sir. And there's a couple of little stories about folks tying a string to the feet of a goose and sending it up, and one where a boy gets stuck and years later a skeleton comes back down.
I have to buy extra clothes to keep me warm on those long Victorian winter nights. I was commanded to buy woollen tights, thermal underwear and stuff, to wear under my chimney-sweep costume. I said I can never admit to wearing tights to my schoolfriends but Bud said chill out my son, they're used to you being weird and anyway, warm willocks are more important. So I made up a thing about one of those angry crowds waving placards that say "We Want Warm Willocks! When do we want them? Now!" although for the Now! I substituted Miaow!
We went to H&M and Primark and we clearly didn't know what we were doing so had to ask a nice girlie to help us and she looked at the shopping list the theatre had given us and in the end we got most of it at M&S, because that's a shop we understand. Football meant that we had to park miles away and started eating lunch at 330. I tried on my new thermal undergarments and found them to be strangely pleasant, felt like I was wearing nothing at all ... so I posed for a chimney-sweeping picture and yes, I know that a besom broom is no good for chimneys.
Film Night was 'Airplane!' during which I correctly recognised Leslie Nielsen and laughed at the silliness.

Womsey Wapids: Over Textualisation of the Young

My lazy teachers decided to take another day off so I was left at a loose end. There is nothing better to do with a loose end that to tie it to someone else's loose end, so we borrowed a Pops who had the same trouble.
Well, that was the plan. What actually happened was, I got up at 9am and was quietly playing Minecraft when Jof phoned from work and said are you ready to go out. It was 930, and Pops was due at 10. I ran upstairs and woke Bud up (yes) and it was like that very first scene in 4 Weddings when they're late for Wedding #1 and they go F*, F*, F* for ages and we were both ready and showered and teethed and breakfasted and dressed in 32 minutes flat, which shows what you can do when you need to.
The options for the day were: bike ride to Portchester Castle and back with play-parks a la mode and added pub lunch, or Romsey Rapids plus play-parks de la maison with bonus pub lunch: we both voted the same way.
He collected Pops and we got into Jof's car because the real one was at the garage.
It is an automatic so doesn't work properly but we got to Romsey Rapids soon enough, driving right past Grandad's mansion, not that we told him. On the way I did my goopy-eyes trick which is where they point in different directions. We entered and exited the car through the boot because of why not.
We got almost the whole Rapids place to ourselves because it was an inset day so all other schoolkids were otherwise employed. So the biggest queue for the waterslide was 2 people and we went round and round. But at noon they switched off the flume and the Lazy River and the Soaker Bucket and the Bubble Blasters so basically we said stuff this and got out and Bud met us and we did the playpark.
It's built for little people but we did the trampolines and the see-saw and chair-bouncers and then drove to Tiggleton Corner (The Common, Southampton) because we like the Cowherds Pub.
Pops couldn't choose so I had giant responsibly-caught fish and gave her some chips to go with her kids-menu chicken and we all left there full as wotsits.
 The Splashpark was empty of water and kids. This was to be expected as it is September and everyone's back to school but you never know, and we'd brought the waterguns just in case. It was interesting to see the topography of the empty pools.
 We posed on top of the long-slide, not for the first time (this one summer 2010), one day these pictures will be on our wedding invites.
We did lots of roundabouting and climbing and we went on the big climbing tree avoiding blackberry prickle-bushes and did gymnastical bar-work on the frames and then we went to the ice cream van. I have bought from this van before and was happy to recommend the giant whippy cone with extra choco-dribbles where the melted choc sauce re-solidifies all down the cone. Pops' eyes opened wide as she saw quite how big my er recommendation was and she said it was the best she'd ever had and finished every bit, who wouldn't. At home, Pops is called Peanut. I've been called worse.
On the way home we played on Pops' new Blackberry mobile phone which was inherited from her Dad so is full of interesting contacts. It was constantly in use with an accidental pointless call from her Mum, and one from her Dad asking if she'd taken her swimming costume and I wanna phone even though I admit it's pointless and she was doing unlimited texts for no other reason than she had unlimited texts. I texted Bud's phone saying Dear Doctor Belly-Dancing Baby but later found that he doesn't have a mobile, wonder who received those messages.
After he'd taken Pops home, we went to my latest audition, for Alice's Adventure in the Underworld, a kooky creepy quirky musical with distinctly hallucinogenic overtones. As per usual, we got there on time and had to wait for 40 minutes before I was called and the audition was taken by 3 boys and 12 girls.
We were doing fine in our groups after 1 hour's warm-up but then when we had to learn a paragraph of the nonsensical poem with a random prop and the other, younger boy had one cymbal and he bashed it on the floor with every word he was practising.
I said shut up and he said you can't make me, I'm practising and I couldn't concentrate so I burst into tears and they phoned Jof to pick me up.
Bud got back from his walk 3 minutes later and took me home and Jof wasn't at home because she'd gone to pick me up and sometimes you can have too many mobile phones, sometimes too few. They are a curse, but maybe I was a little tired and emotional.