May to June 2017

Bank Holiday Monday, so it rained. Forced to go out as part of my new unreasonable fitness regime of having to walk somewhere every day, so I fed the birds (absent), sent even more bottles to their recycling doom (3) and climbed up a climbing frame in the park (1). It might be exactly where Sydney broke her arm so I erred on the cautious side and didn't go up too high. This was deemed sufficient, and I hastened back to Skype-Crafting with my new-found Skype-Craft mates.

Bonus Film night was 'Cast Away' in which the man with a snake in his boot crashed a plane and spent 4 years on an island arguing with a football called Wilson. I liked the cave art and crabs. I think it was also Bank Holiday Monday for 4 years in the south Pacific because it was always raining there too.

Meter Made

Anyway, with its monotonous regularity, Grandad's birthday came around again. He is now 88 but still pretends not to be.

What we normally do is plan a registered activity, usually involving a walk to a set place, and have a pub lunch, do some maths and have a swim. This formula has worked for us so far.

But today was slightly different in that the gas and electric parasite company had arranged a Smart Meter to be fitted. This is not the well-dressed person that greets you at the door of Walmart, it is a meter that can send in the readings by itself. So we cleared out the cupboard under the stairs, which is now the only place you can get into the underfloor Hades now that the rest of the house has been tiled or carpeted.

The Meter Man arrived and we coped with the event by leaving Jof in charge, and played a Gary Moore CD all the way to Grandad. He was pleased to see us and has a special ritual. Prior to this occasion, he stood on a stool made by G-G-Dad to hug Bud, and I stood on the same stool to hug him. This is to even up our relative heights a bit, for a better quality hug. But recently I have been growing and the Equalizer Stool has been replaced by a small leather briefcase. Is it strong enough, we asked. He opened it to reveal a massive chunk of wood which fits perfectly, and can easily support my expanding frame.

So as usual, I had a swim and then tried out the gym. They have a rack of dumb-bells from 1kg to 10kg. I struggled to lift the 10kg one so we selected smaller ones and pumped iron for a bit, as you do on your 88th birthday.

Not content with the pumpage and some cross-training, we drove to Winchester where you can find St Catherine's Hill. This mellifluous carbuncle on the face of the world is also a nature reserve and has a free car park, what more do you need. So we split up and ascended the natural tumulus and met at the top in a copse of beech trees, with many bugs and dogs. From there you can clearly see Winchester cathedral, where the three of us scored the records for oldest and youngest tower-climber simultaneously, a couple of years ago.

I had carefully checked out a footpath that runs around the hill well below the summit and confidently led the way. When M Senior and M Even-More-Senior chose their own route I was righteously huffed and scythed every passing plant with a stick I'd found that closely resembles a Minecraft axe. This is why I'm lower down the hill in my mustard-coloured shirt.

At the bottom he promised me a short walk to the Bell Inn public house and eatery in St Cross which is a village a mile south of Winchester. We walked along the side of a river and saw fish and swans and ducks and cows and sluices and bulrushes and weirs and streams and playing fields and weeping willows, and most of it belongs to Winchester College which is very posh and probably inherited all the land from the church, which is a big landowner in these parts, for the last thousand years or so.

But slowly it dawned on me that I had been conned yet again and my feet were getting tired and it was not the 200 yards I swore he'd said. While everything was joyous and pretty (with its many rivulets and streams of the River Itchen) and verdant and peaceful and historic O yea, there was far too much of it and my stick-scything became more demonstrative, as did my loud complaining.

But just as I was about to expire from exhaustion and starvation, we arrived at the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty (established 1132) and the Bell Inn. I had scampi which came on a wooden board with chips in a bucket, as is the modern way, Bud had his first Caesar salad and Grandad had birthday sausages with birthday mash and birthday gravy. In the Priory (with its Hundred Men Hall Tea Room) you can clearly see medieval and Tudor buildings, and G-Dad sings there every now and then.

Fortunately the return journey was much shorter even though Grandad definitely trolled me about only 5 miles to go etc, and we drove back to his for maths and geography studies, and the suitcase ritual again. He has been given some sponge-cake by a grateful neighbour so we took some off his hands. I have some equations to solve for G-Dad homework and we listened to Jimi Hendrix on the way home, in my opinion he is mad.

Disc Jockeying

Up at 1030 because of holidays. Recently, when Bud's last job died, he took a load of old kit (such as the workbench in the garage) out on a proper signed property pass which now makes me the legal owner. The factory itself was the old Disc Drive manufacturing plant for IBM once upon a decade and as such, had all these old display cabinets with engineering marvels of bygone years.

Problem is, you know it's all going to go in the skip apart from anything like pencils spirited out of the building by concerned employees, or anything of actual value which will get sent to new factories.

But the historical artefacts would be lost forever, and that is a crime against humanity. So he asked the Super-Big-Boss man if he could save these dusty remnants for the Science Museum in London, where I visited 2 years ago and got some great stuff from the shop.

And the collection was made and the museum contacted and they said yes, we'd like this one item please, so we get to keep the rest. The item in question is a 14 inch metallic data storage disc from some long-forgotten product which shows how much space 1 Megabyte or similar took up on a disc, and how that space got smaller as their clever engineers improved the technology over time. Today you'd have to carry about 400 of these to match the storage in your phone. All those little squares are labelled with the IBM product families, from the good old 350 series of the 1960s right up to the byte-busting 3380 we all loved so much back in the 80s.

So we said O Yea, we shall deliver it unto you when the trains have that special cheap offer on again, and it is this week during my holiday. And the nice lady in the museum said sorry, we don't work weekends, I would have come in to meet you but I'll be in Spain at a wedding so nobody will be here. So we said we'll just leave it with a security guard, look at the museum again and go off to that groov-acious cable car near the Millennium Dome.

And she said no, they're not allowed to take it, (shame we'd already bought the train tickets) but can I offer you 2 free tickets to the Robot Exhibition to make up for it. So, for my daily walk, we went to the post office and posted it to London, where it will arrive at the same time as we do. Gosh Diddly-Poodle-Poo, thus the cookie crumbles. But we have given it to the nation, so we did the right thing. And Bud went to another interview so I got to play Minecraft for hours with nobody telling me off for hooting like the Monkey Cage at Marwell Zoo.

The Never-Ending Sandy

Years and years (6) ago we invented the 12-mile bike ride where you cycle down to the Hayling ferry, cross the water to Hayling Island, ride up the old defunct Hayling Billy railway line to Havant, and catch a train home.

This one has done us proud many times and there's always time to stop off at the very-bumpy-bike paths and the sand that never ends at low tide, and the funfair, pub and crab-catching areas.

And as it was a nice hot day we rode to the ferry and got there 10 minutes late because we'd stopped off at the park on the way. Last time we used the ferry, it was every 10 minutes but now it's back to the bad old days with only 1 an hour, and we hadn't looked it up in advance.

We waited for 50 minutes and I learned to skim stones and we could see that it was low tide. At the last minute, Laughing Boy Thomas (in my Scout Group) and his family got on the ferry with us, and we had to give him 50p because he didn't have enough money for the ticket. At least someone was prepared.

And we walked out along the endless dunes of the 'West Winner' which is a vast expanse of sand that is exposed at low tide and you can walk out so far into the sea we've never really actually reached the end. You get a good view of Eastney Nudist Beach and Fort Cumberland with the sewage works with the massive chimney. I'd already elected not to bother with the funfair so we got our ice creams in early.

At the harbour mouth were many kids going mummy mummy look at me and then kicking a football or standing on a rock or dabbing or doing something else pointless but still expecting mummy to say O what a clever boy you are, I expect you'll have loads of girlfriends. Kids.

Of course I had to cycle directly into a massive headwind at all times and directions but eventually we reached the old railway line where we stopped off to ride up and down the bumpy cycle tracks, and met Laughing Boy Thomas coming back the other way, a good trick if you can do it.

It isn't really a long way up the coastal path to Langstone but sometimes it feels that way. The Ship Inn supplies our deserved lunch and the food was very nice but actually a little small, serves me wrong for choosing from the kids menu. The Chocolate muffin with cream and ice cream was good, though.

The train took us home and I cycled straight out into a main road because kids have right of way, correct?

Covfefe. No, I just wanted to talk crap, because hithertoyeauntohereafterforsoothverilygadzooks, FML.

Indifferential Equations

Up first, even though I don't have to go to work! We woke Jof up and left the house before the rush hour was over. This week is getting somewhat formulaic, in that the daily structure has definitely been seen before. When we see Grandad, we do 1 registered activity with a walk, pub lunch and maths lesson. When we do London, we do 3 activities, go by train and drink beer on the way back. When we do Chichester, we swim, buy coins and investigate medieval architecture.

So today we had an hour and 3/4 in the Westgate Leisure Centre swimming pool. Having taken the same wrong turning we took last time, we were better able to correct ourselves and swam and dived and went on the waterslide and splashed each other and fought, directly against Jof's orders, because meh.

And I bought some more goggles on the way out for only £17, hope they last. I didn't get the new full-face mask based on Edvard Munch's Scream. From there, it is but a short hop to our favourite antique shop by Westgate where we bought several coins and tokens, especially the squashed 1p coins from the Statue of Liberty, Epcot Centre and Empire State Building. Couldn't help but notice he had an advertising flyer on his counter for 'The Boy King' at the Groundlings Theatre, where I act.

It had been 3 days since I had eaten by then (or so I made out) so we had food at the Wetherspoons again (who says you can't have scampi 3 times in the same week?) and continued our tour of the Roman city walls. Chichester is rather good for this kind of thing, Dear Follower Fiona told us about it and we're still doing it now. We did the North-East quadrant and found a splendid swingpark with sandpark and tyre-swings right inside the walls at 'Priory Park'.

The boundary rope of the cricket pitch has to divert slightly due to the presence of the mound of a Norman castle (previously much larger): the Guildhall is all that remains of the medieval priory (closed by order of Henry the 8th I am I am), and in the grounds of that priory they recently discovered a Roman villa of millionaire proportions because nobody has built on the site in 1600 years. You can now get married in the Guildhall, but you don't have to. In the background is the Cathedral (also built by that chap Norman), and the place was upgraded a bit by Alfred the Great, you know the way it is.

I climbed the castle mound, swung on the tyres, and carried on round the walls. On the way home we stopped off at the post office to wait in a queue that stretched into the car park for a packet of undelivered coins, so I read 'The world's worst children 2' by David Walliams. At home I Skyped Sydney and Jof brought home some more coins for us to sort through. Not that we like coins in any way.

London

Another planned trip, with the same structure as most of our many previous visits. OK, so we'd had to post the historical artefact of data storage technology we were donating to the Science Museum, but that was no reason not to go to London as we'd bought the train tickets anyway.

Jof went to work and we left the house dead on schedule and arrived at the station with enough time to get a coffee and mess about on the lifts for a while. Train journeys are necessarily dull so I spent my copious free time looking at horses lying down, prostrate cows and apparently unconscious sheep, and babbling.

We secured and successfully defended a 4-seat bay for the entire journey, and by the time we pulled into Waterloo, I'd eaten a Scotch egg, half a pack of cocktail sausages, 3 chocolate bars, crisps and 2 juices.

Trips to London are characterized by frantic periods of activity broken up by lots of sitting down, as well as lengthy stints of thrift punctuated by brief bouts of profligacy. The minute we hit Waterloo we sprang into action. I am now an underground map-reading expert and got us to South Kensington for the Science Museum in no time.

The mostly-lady at the front desk was confused by our request for our pre-booked tickets and sent us downstairs to the toilets who also failed to give us tickets. 2 floors up from there was the actual Robot Exhibition and the free tickets from our new insider friend saved us a good £20.

Some of the early robots (automatons) were freaky as were the religious beliefs of their first viewing customers, seeing moving models of monks as magic. There was a cabinet of prosthetic arms that definitely looks cyborg-ish. The early film robots were epic in a clunky way and there was a T-800 that appeared in Terminator Salvation and some more modern AI bots moving inexorably towards the uncanny valley of human likeness.

We reckon Sexbots will fund the next industry great leap forward, as the military has done in other areas. Sadly there were no Terminator T-shirts in the shop, maybe they couldn't get a licence. I was wearing a Minecraft T-shirt so wanted to revisit the Hall of Archaic Computer Games, to show off. It took us a while to find the right staircase to the basement but once I'd squashed a couple of pennies we hit the shop.

It's great in there and you always want to buy 27 things but I restricted myself to a Minecraft book. He got 2 rocks (one of pure silicon, one of translucent titanium glass) but I found myself playing a game which was offered unto me.

Back in the day when even the parents were young, all you could get were simple 8-bit games with shooting or planes or similar, and you were grateful because that was cutting-edge tech. But with the computing power, storage and processing speed of today, the simplicity of the coding of the retro-games of yester-decade means you can fit 200 8-bit games into a gizmo the size of a matchbox, plug it directly into your flat-screen TV and off you go!

But there is no rest for the wicked and we left with our booty to go back underground, via a man with a huge bubble-making kit in a precinct by the Geological Society. A busker maimed Stairway to Heaven to speed us on our way.

Tottenham Court Road was just 2 underground changes away and along New Oxford Street and up Bloomsbury and Great Russell and hey presto, the British Museum. It has columns to die for and a big queue for the bag check. I led the way and we saw Korean and Chinese ceramics, Somalian carvings, Victorian watercolours, African chairs made out of recycled guns, Solomon Island head-dresses, Moorish textiles, Minoan pottery, Greek urns, Egyptian mummies, Japanese incense burners, a Michelangelo cartoon, Mesopotamian statues, Korean coins, a rock crystal skull, Amerindian totem poles, the world's oldest flip-flops and lots of gold.

In the shop I got a Pyramid pencil sharpener and an Egyptian cat fridge magnet for Jof, because she is always asking if she can have a cat.

We also found a Pizzeria which proved highly acceptable for both taste and price, not the usual situation in London tourist traps. The pizzas were hand-made to order, cheesier than an 80s compilation and mine was only £6 with added drink and side order of broccoli.

Avoiding the numerous flyer-dealers outside, we found 'Coincraft' a Piccadilly-based coin dealer but the cheapest coin was £65 so we ran away, past the gaudy tourist tat shops with their beefeater teddies and Union Jack mugs and telephone boxes of all nations.

I have heard of the Docklands Light Railway and wanted to experience it having heard that some of it is above ground. The transfer was a bit complicated at 'Bank' but we got onto the DLR and it was epic soon enough as we went uphill and over canals and roads and other trains and looked into peoples' bathroom windows, unusual for an underground train. In the underground station was a poster advert for the Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre - which I'll be visiting next week.

Canary wharf (not a singing Klingon) is a vast engineering marvel both above and below ground but they could do with improved signage, in my opinion. After fighting with Julie B (the Jubilee line), we finally got to Greenwich North and the Emirates 'Air-Line' cable car over the Thames.

I collect (amongst other things) novel forms of transport and this was to be my first cable car. I got my own ticket and we waited for the pods to do their slow circuit around the disembarkation/embarkation zone. You can see the procedure while waiting and it is all very slow until the car re-engages with the immense steel hawser whish is powered by the giant red horizontal turning-wheels.

Once you've been engaged, it shoots you up to the maximum velocity of 6 M/S and you climb up and up over the pylons until you are 90 metres over the Thames, even at low tide, and you bob along swinging gently in the breeze.

OK so it doesn't have the raw acceleration of the Solent RIB ride or the brutal altitude of a long-haul Jumbo jet but it was excellent with views of building sites and barges and cable cars coming in the other direction and the runway of London City Airport and the Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf and overground railways and the Thames Barrier and planes and cranes and ships and water taxis and the giant pylons holding it up and skyscrapers and wakeboarders and a restaurant on a ship and I said the cable car would be better with a glass floor and a fellow passenger turned decidedly green. It was all over too soon as we landed at the Emirates Royal Docks.

But we'd purchased return tickets so we did it all again! I got the 2 available souvenir medallion coins from the machine (automaton-robots taking your money, just saying) but we didn't get the pointless souvenir interactive photo because I'd got quite sufficient imagery of the ride already, thank you.

Bud always wants to go the extra mile but it felt like 5 as we sailed past Waterloo and got off at Westminster to see the armed cops.

I found 6 outside the Houses of Parliament and laughed at Black Rod's Garden Entrance which sounds dreadfully rude. It has a heavy wrought iron gate with a little wooden shed for the least popular and perhaps flatulent Policeman. I also found a 7 mile trek past Horseferry kid's park (with actual wooden horses) to Lambeth Bridge and a further 164-mile yomp across unfamiliar terrain to the Archbishop's Park next to Lambeth Palace. This green space has a top-notch swingpark that you can see from the train and I absolutely agree that I need to go there.

But inserting it at the end of a 11-hour, 3-activity day was gross malfeasance, wilful incompetence and cruel and unusual punishment, as both of my legs had fallen off with exhaustion. I bleated and moaned my way down the never-ending pavement back to Waterloo and agreed that the Archbishop's Personal Swingpark will be done first on our next trip.

In Waterloo Station we bought the same 4-pack of Belgian beer as the last 8 times and gigantic chocolate buttons and the Bucket'o'Chocolate and then we met Football 'Arry from my school class. He had been to the Imperial War Museum.

On the train home we secured and successfully defended a 6-seat bay and Charlie (from my acting class) visited us and ate some chocolate and we battled a bit because I was tired and just wanted to read my Minecraft book.

At the beginning of the day Jof had told us to text her regularly as she was worried about terrorists. So we laughed at her and made sure to update her facetiously about our locations and activities about 8 times during the expedition: but for the last 2 she was asleep at home.

We missed the latest London terror attack by 4 hours and 1/2 a mile.

Sunday started at 1220, which means a 13-hour sleep. If you're going to break the all-time sleep record, do it properly. It was a quiet day: I couldn't even play my Retro Mini TV 8-bit games console because my LCD screen doesn't have A/V ports. So we have to go to Tandy or Radio Shack to get a RF converter.

May 2017 4/4

At last! Up far too early to loiter with intent.

Many schools send kids on residential courses lasting a few days and I've been on the Stubbington one and I've heard about the Parents-Get-Lost one on the Isle of Wight. But a new one has joined the pack - Marwell Zoo.

I've been to this zoo a couple of times and they do have a study centre but now they've added dormitory huts and numerous activities for youths both bold and wet.

Jof had gathered together all my kit and barring the last few things we'd forgotten such as raincoat, it was all ready and I togged up and set off. Jof dragged me back and showed how much she loves me by saying have a good time and I'll miss you and don't forget to wipe your bottom and loads of other mothery blarney and I escaped the tightening noose and fled.

On the way to school we started to see other classmates dressed like me with suitcases and finger-spinners and in the assembly hall stood a bunch of parents and the Left Luggage Hall of Doom. We all trooped upstairs and the parents dispersed: that made us officially zoo animals.

The journey was by 2 coaches: even a short hop like that is challenging for energized youngsters and the teachers knew that so we stopped off half way there to run around a random field, and got to the zoo at noon for a site tour, and a lunch of sandwiches, apples, juice and chocolate bars.

This is when we found that although the campsite is next to the zoo, it is not actually in it. This was a let-down for those of us who wanted to be Ostriches, or who wanted to feed a certain someone to the tigers. In fact, we couldn't go to the zoo or Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe at all, because it is in the public domain. But now we are older, these residential camps are activity-heavy. There was a large refectory tent, and 6 Stalag Luft-style dormitory huts with a seating area outside, 3 for boys, 2 for girls and 1 for teachers. They got comfy chairs.

Activity #1: Rock Climbing Wall, with harness. Topping out at 50 feet, I got 35 feet up the wall that gets steeper and steeper the further up you go, until it goes past vertical and curves back on itself.

Activity #2: Obstacle Course. Has stepping stones, hop-jumps, and a massive tunnel. This tunnel has anti-bear defence lids at both ends and is wiggly and pitch black with minimal crawlspaces and corners and drops. It was ace. But on the jumping-wall, my legs were not long enough to reach to the 3rd level.

For dinner we had stir-fry chicken of which I approve. Then we had a 2-stage activity. First, your team got a random item and had to make an advert for it, act it out, and this would get you points - and in this case, points make money - with which you buy materials for the next stage. We got a golf ball and made an advert for an Un-Chewable Gobstopper. I was the chewer and we had people railing against sugar overload for young teeth, then a granny came on and declared she was tougher than a gobstopper and she was shot by a rifleman, I guess you had to be there. But we won the acting competition and got the most money.

Activity #3: Egg Bounce. This old chestnut is known to us all. Each team protected their egg from a 30 foot drop using the materials purchased with the advertising revenue. We named our egg 'Dr Scramble' and we had so many layers of packaging, our egg-pod floated gently down and our species was saved from extinction. In fact only one egg ('Harambegg') died, when its hat became detached and it sprayed an arc of yolk everywhere. I got 8 hours' sleep.

On day 2, Ben bunked in with me because Child A snores. Breakfast was Full English and I went back for 3rd helpings, with numerous sausages. I need the energy, you know.

Activity #4: Milk Crate Stack. Again, this one is well known to us all, I've done it at the Portsmouth Water Sports Centre. Again, you're harnessed and people throw milk crates up to you and you stack them (in teams of 2) and see how high you can get, just not like Jim Morrison. I reckon we got to Level 10.

Activity #5: Wayfaring. This is essentially orienteering, your team gets a map with points marked on it: each point on the ground has a letter hidden from easy view, you collect the letters, unscramble the magic word, and win. I was a total Map-Guru and on some of the positions, I found the letter nailed to the back of a tree or similar when others had walked right past. The magic word was rifle-range. Then lunch.

Activity #6: Raft Building. OK, so most of us have done this too. You have rope, logs and barrels and you lash them together and row off into the sunset with laughter and gay abandon. I wore my water-shoes, trunks, tracksuit bottoms and 2 T-shirts. Everything got soaked and that's when I had the only shower of the week, mmm. But please notice the epic weather in the verdant and countrified surroundings of this entire residential course. A nice change from summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty gritty.

After supper (chicken goujons) we had film night - Despicable Me.

Day 3 did include breakfast, but I only went back for seconds.

Activity #7: Archery, another former favourite. I scored a bullseye from 5 metres.

Activity #8: Quad Biking. Well, I've driven trundly safety cars at Butlins but never anything like this! It was amazing with giant helmets with sticky-out bits at the front and a big D-shaped course with wiggly bits and a long straight. Owen seems to be perfectly designed for quad-biking and took the corners like a boss. I opened her up on the long straight and gave it full throttle: ok, so you only get up to 15 mph but it feels like you're in a Spitfire.

Activity #9: Zipline. This one is a detached part of the aerial adventure and you climb 10 metres up a tree and zip 25 metres over a lake. It does go really fast, and you get 2 goes. Funny thing we noticed, the lake had 2 crocodiles in it. One of them is called One-eyed Steve after he lost a fight with the other one.

Activity #10: Aerial Adventure. Similar to but smaller than the one at Centre Parcs, you have a variety of obstacles including the suspended planks. The planks hang in mid-air at different levels and have ropes through each corner. So getting from one to the other isn't always easy. Average competitor 'Child B' could get across in 3 minutes. I took up the super-retro-challenge and went across backwards in 1 minute, for which I got a prize - an extra chocolate bar at dinner.

Later, after sausages and mash, we had a campfire and sang songs such as 'Eat the banana' and 'The balls on the bus go round and round'.

Day 4 was sadly truncated by having to go home. But first we had the Full English breakfast again and I had 3rd helpings, you've got to take opportunities when they arise.

Activity #11: Rifle Shooting. OK, so it was only air rifles, but this isn't the 1970s any more. I scored 8 rounds through the bullseye and will get my cardboard target back later.

Activity #12: Gladiators. Straight away we thought we'd be standing in a sandy ring poking each other with rubber spears to the music from Star Trek but no, this is a climbing game. You have to ascend the various levels and go over the suspended tyres and sit on the upper log, all whilst securely harnessed. I could not get past the spinning tyres. Child C fell off the top bit and swung around, held up by his harness, which squished his ribcage and he vomited copiously from a great height, most fun to see.

And after a hearty meal for the condemned kids, we all got back on the coaches and came home. My first priority was a shower, then straight back to Youtube which I had missed terribly. I had lost my voice (but gained a hoarse) because of all the shouting.

All in all, the school trip to Marwell Zoo activity was totally bodacious and epic. Of course, we are of that special intermediate age so there was lots of bandying about of rude phraseology. We could hear each other through the prefabricated tent/chalets and once Child D heard a particularly funny joke and laughed so much there was fluid leakage. So he needed new trousers and bedsheets and everyone laughed at him, which may not have helped. But you get that sort of thing.

Chasing Ghosts (and Swans)

Back in 1957, when Jof was a kid, her parents used to take annual holidays in a little seaside resort called Mudeford, pronounced Meoo-deford by us and Muddiford by everybody else. This former fishing village sits at the mouth of Christchurch Harbour and is pretty and isolated and has coastal pine trees and marram grass on the dunes and views to the Isle of Wight.

But that was in 1957, and Jof fancied trying to rediscover the hotel they used to stay at, called the Avonmouth Hotel then, but since renamed. A lot can change in that time.

We approached at speed using a hand-drawn map which got us to the car park in 1 hour 10 minutes, no detours, and 1 entire compilation CD of "Dyno-Saurs of Rock" which Jof kept telling us to turn down and I kept secretly turning back up again until she stopped wittering from the back seat of the car where I usually send her.

After some excellent climbing in the coastal pine trees, and having paid for 4 hours' parking, we wandered off in search of the long-lost Hotel of Yesteryear and quite soon, she found it and we looped round the back to make sure. That's when Bud said ooo look, it's the River Mude after which the village was named, let's get a closer look, and I stepped heavily in a patch of newly laid concrete which was clearly marked by a large yellow traffic cone, inserted a deep, full footprint in a permanent position for future generations to admire, and we invoked the great Monty Python, and went Run Away, Run Away.

Back on Mudeford Quay, we saw that it contains Gifte Shoppes, fisherman's equipment stores, a sailing club, Lifeboat station, pub and lots of tourist stuff, including millions of people crabbing (they get bigger crabs in Dorset) and a ferry. This ferry is marked on the map as going to Hengistbury Head (a sandy outcrop about 50 yards away) and Christchurch Central, with Priory, Church and an actual town.

So after a fortifying ice cream, we got the ferry (departs every 12 minutes) for only £3.70 the lot and it was quick and good, 10/10 for them. But that was it. It only went 56 yards to Hengistbury Head, and you had to get the fancy wooden luxury cruiser to Christchurch for £20 return.

So we did that, and we saw swans and ducks and outdoor centres and expensive beachfront houses and buoys shaped like top hats and it was all rather good. In Christchurch we crossed the Quomp or the Quim or the Quagga or the Quorn which is apparently the greensward open space with swingpark and headed into the bustling metropolis, finding a bank for monetary purposes and The George Inn which gave us scampi and chips and squid and beer and toilet facilities.

This is an old town so just down narrow medieval lanes from the pub is the old 14th century ducking stool lovingly recreated in 1986. It was most tranquil with the ducks and the weeping willows, but the description sign makes it clear that back then, the town magistrates could punish mouthy, gobby women and horrendous screaming fishwives who didn't know their place for being 'Scolds', gosh how things have changed, now brassy wenches get on TV.

Across the road is a Norman castle, now totally ruined. OK, so the keep mound remains with a few walls but the grounds are nice with access to the church through peaceful gardens where a wedding was going on, nice work if you can get it. We walked through a lime-tree tunnel and came out by the Quay.

In Quomp/Qwerty/Quandary Fields is a decent swingpark with good-looking added splashpark, both very well attended. They tried to get me to cool off in the life-giving waters, but I was having none of it because all our swimming-type kit was back in the car.

But we'd already walked past a boat-hiring place and I had my eye on the motorboats. So Bud conned us into only having 30 minutes (£20) instead of the hour we should have taken (£30) saying we didn't want to miss the ferry back.

We were allocated a blue 5-seater motorboat and the engine just wouldn't start, even when Bud pulled the cord and made it go chumf chumf. But then there was an orange one next to it and orange is my favourite colour and that one started. The rules were to keep to the right, only go upstream to the 100 foot chimney, and come back. As soon as we were out in the main channel, Bud and I swapped places and I drove the whole way.

You go upstream past lots of fancy houses with yachts and motor boats and verandahs and yuccas and weeping willows and it does rather make you want to live by the sea. The boat was programmed to chunter along at 4 knots and the steering was slow to react so you Tokyo-drifted along like a car on an oily skidpan and I got used to it rapidly and the boring old adults just had to sit there while I bossed it totally.

And once we'd gone under the bridge and met the 100 foot chimney stack, I did a massive handbrake turn in the river and it was epic and gosh I do somewhat like this boating lark. And I got us back to the pontoon and Bud did another handbrake turn to get us alongside which I could have probably done better and we had 45 minutes before the next ferry, did I mention we were conned.

So we had coffee and saw the medieval mill and fed the swans (saw one hissing at a sausage dog that got too close - very funny) with locally produced corn and the ferry arrived early and took us back to Hengistbury Head very slowly due to an adverse wind, seeing some New Forest ponies of varying ages and girths on a tidal island.

And knowing that we still had to take the 56 yard ferry back to Mudeford Quay I agreed to at least look at the millions of beach huts and see the sea, because I don't usually get the chance, living on an island in the sea.

It was sandy. This was immediately different and we gambolled around in the dunes with their spiky grass and messed around on the beach and before long we were paddling and I was digging in the sand and getting totally wet and dirty and that is what you are supposed to do, even though the sea temperature was only 13 degrees. I rinsed off by plunging in right in front of the Needles lighthouse and Alum Bay, where I went a few years ago on the chairlift.

After a while I dressed (with added authentic Dorset sand) and retrieved an errant swan feather and we got the ferry 46 yards back to civilisation (low tide).

There we discovered that the kind but cheeky old Burghers of Christchurch Town Council had awarded us a £25 parking ticket, no doubt as the ducking ducking stool is off the byelaw statute books nowadays.

Stupid thing to mention: of the 4 different boating-craft we were on today, employment agencies phoned Bud while we were on 2 of them. I still maintain that in the event of a lottery win I want a kayak, he wants a dinghy and she wants a motor-cruiser, but then she also wants goats, alpacas, baby horses and 17 cats so you can't trust her.

And, pink in special places due to all the sunshine, we drove home taking only 1 wrong turning which enabled us to see some new and interesting corners of this green and pleasant land, including the fabled Hotel of Yesteryear that Jof saw down a side street as we left.

We kept pace with a fifty-something chap in a bright red Lotus Elise on the motorway and the west-bound side was clogged forever as half the country went to Devon for the weekend.

Meanwhile we pigged on chocolate and West Country Fudge (it's exactly the same fudge box you buy in Stonehenge, St Ives and Weston super Mare, just with a postcard from Mudeford stuck on the top). I was promised all the crabbing equipment I could eat next time we return. We took it in turns to shower.

On Saturday I relaxed with Minecraft. Briefly, I attended acting school where the only other student was a 14 year-old girl who is friends with the older sister of Lucy, who is in my school class. Because there were no drama teachers available, we had a predominantly Tech lesson and played with the lights and I did a White Haze when I was supposed to do a Purple Haze, but my Super Silver Haze was all sparkly with crystals.

And I went back on Minecraft and Skyped with some random dude while Jof watched the FA cup final. Film Night was 'Crocodile Dundee' with some really dreadful outfits from the 1980s and lots of clever jokes that I missed because I was arguing. Showered whilst singing my Dyno-Saurs of Rox medley including excerpts from hits such as 'Stacey's Mom has we will rock you down to Gorky Park, and she's buying a stairway to the winds of change, when the wheels have ideas of their own, smooth as the groove that's making you move, taking the long way around...'

Sundays are always a battle 'twixt sofa and cake but Jof made me go out for a brisk walk, luckily rain stopped pain within 4 minutes. Meanwhile, 2 blokes were filling up a 'Man with Van'-style removals lorry with random rubbish and we noticed some dead pallets. You can't let these things go to waste so we mentioned the Scout Camp-fire and what do you know, both of these old boys were ex-Scouts and helped us carry 6 pallets and a table over the road to our garage, saves a journey to the tip and it's all in a good cause. Film night was 'Expendables 2' with guns and bombs and funnies.