The Great Conker Shortfall 2017

So there I was, putting best foot forward (right, I'm not a left-footer) to meet a certain hot chick with whom to share the walk to work. She was not there, and I waited around for a few minutes too. I had to make do with Jof. And I thought girls were reliable.

In school we will be visiting a girl's school to use their new science laboratory for a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) lesson. As we are going in 3 different groups, does that make us Stem Cells? Apparently we have to wear armour because we'll be using explosive potions and people have been blown up and burnt before, like Seamus Finnigan in Potter. At lunchtime we all did hand-farts and armpit farts until the room reverberated with the sounds of gassy joy.

The workmen have been busy in the park. The best Conker tree has been stripped and chopped, that'll let more light onto those 2 guys that practise Judo there, but will mean fewer conkers for us collectors. Whenever I meet a fence like this one, I always rattle it, shouting "Wake up!!!" like Sarah Connor in her burning dream.

Also, the climbing-flagpole has been uprooted and replaced by a green spinning-ring-on-a-pole, so perhaps its head-height instructions signpost can go as well. In Scouts we played games and I got 2 more badges but I won't get my Super-Silver badge before the next award ceremony.

Can You Feel the Hate Tonight

Sunday. And it really was, the Eastern Drove Road ox-and-cart highway was nose-to-tail all the way to the coast with that simmering heat haze of petrol fumes and anger emanating from people saying "we've been in this queue for 45 minutes and we haven't even got to the seafront overflow car park yet ... ".

But I didn't care, because Minecraft has a calefaction quotient of zero, even when it's raining. Eventually, she dragged me out and we hit Tunnel Park. This one has a large asphalt area so we kicked the giant yellow tennis ball about a bit and returned some other kid's football a few times and shot for the net in the basketball section and none of us were any good at any of it.

So we relegated ourselves to the swing-park division and soon attracted a group of local youths, and we introduced them to Giant Stupid Ball Tag and they loved it, and it's very different there because you can hide behind the train, and seriously, don't even get in the tunnel, because it only has 2 ways out. But because the miniature steam trains (Portsmouth Model Engineering Society) were firing up, too many little tiny kids arrived and you just can't be boisterous because you don't know if any of them are yours and you just can't risk killing them.

I was very hot so we sought refuge in the much cooler Co-Op (2 Ribenas for £2) and got home and pigged lunch and went to Okeley Dokely's house. I'd had him round for a playdate recently so he returned the favour and we built a Minecraft Hotel with, like, 27 bathrooms and we're collaborating on some luxurious rooms to coincide with the Victorious Festival, and we were so quiet his Dad forgot we were there and managed to paint a bench.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Johnny and Robert had asked me round for a Random Barbecue in the pleasant evening sun. Even though we were 3 hours late we all played 10-pin Bowling on the Wii and it's not the same as real life and there was the odd tussle but lots of laughter.

Throughout the day I sang excerpts from the Lion King: mostly, can you feel the pain tonight, or can you smell the farts tonight, or many more enigmatic variations upon a theme.

The Silence of the Little Lambs

This morning I'd already done my hour of screen-time before breakfast so he made me do my Numeracy II (4 operations) homework in order to get more. It took me so long I hardly got dressed before Sydney came round. Some kid had got hit by a car in her road, a salutary lesson for all us smaller people who don't look.

It's all kicking off at acting. Not only is there a new showcase performance to work towards, we've got auditions for the play in a couple of weeks and they're bringing in a new uniform. We learned songs from the Lion King and Sydney seems to be an accomplished singer and has helped me to find the right notes, previously I found plenty of notes, but not necessarily the right ones.

You need to have a passport photo for the audition application (even though you don't travel to another country for the audition) so we stopped off at Sainsburys' as they have a Photo-Me booth. We both did our pictures and then we did another batch both at the same time for personal consumption only, like people used to in the 1980s. There was no snogging.

Jof had gone back to bed with the special headache with the flashing lights so we were on pain of total silence. The cohorts of lively football fans at the pub did not know this, however, and kept up a very creditable barrage of rowdy roundelays for ages. After Scottish beefburgers we hit the park and swung happily in the sun and I took her home and we played with Bella the Bloodhound and then I Minecrafted while he watched Danny John-Jules in Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels and Jof went to the Pub and we saw the Lion King with music by Elton John and I liked it and noticed many reference jokes, I liked it where Simba's Dad said I am your Father in amazingly the same voice as Darth Vader and gosh you'd hardly know the parrot was Mr Bean.

A Red Letter Day for the Blues

So recently Jof has been trying to cut the cloying apron strings of dependence by letting me walk quite a lot of the way to school, my route isn't as easy as others and everyone develops at a different rate etc.

But today we made an arrangement whereby I get to walk in with a fellow student, always a good way of improving independence for 2 at once and a boon for me as she is the best-looking girl in the school, hurrah!

It was also Blue Day 2016 in memory of Tom who died of cancer so I wore my blue woolly hat which admittedly was a bit hot. Then I did a video audition for a part in a short film in which I played a boy called Thomas who is terminally ill, stop me if this is all sounding horribly familiar.

Anyway, Bud is out at the pub tonight to say farewell to Dear Follower Martin who has left work to spend more time with the Tour de France and a rum called 'Kraken', so I walked to the station to meet up with him until Jof picked me up. Well that was the plan, in the end he just left me home alone and I didn't notice.

Ain't Nobody Here but us Monkeys

In school we have a detective saga in literacy in which we solve word puzzles and make sentences and so forth, looks like there might be 12 stages to go through to unmask the murderer, in which case it's clearly the Zodiac Killer and therefore Ted Cruz, suddenly a man with more time on his hands. Our school library was a polling station again for some kind of local vote, but they had to put blankets over the windows after some people took pictures of the kids last time.

Bud was trying to explain the recent rise of Joke candidates such as Corbyn and Trump as opposed to the previous Joke candidates such as Screaming Lord Sutch and Pitt the Even Younger, but Jof kept on getting all militant about it.

Anyway, I got to swimming early to inspect the chasm in the fundament, the cross-dimensional schism in space-time, and the crack in the fabric of reality. This is a split brick by where the blue pole goes in above the viewing area at the deep end of my chosen pool and they've decided to close for repairs. At my last pool they had to close for weeks when the pool sprung a leak, luckily I have a backup pool, as one does. Normally they get twitchy about large cameras in poolside environments, but there was nobody there.

♫♪ D.I.V.O.R.C.E. ♪♫

So there I was, busy with a set of test questions when a colleague started deliberately twittering in my ear because of my known short fuse design error, and once a chink in the armour is found, it can be manipulatively exploited, and my armour can be a bit holey sometimes, just not holier than thou.
So I had a bad time and was a little fragile before Wednesday Park but agreed to give it a chance and sensibly took a Frisbee so it wouldn't all be football-related.

A lovely day, the park was busy and we frisbeed happily for a while and then we ball-tagged until one of us cheated in my eyes and I said well I'm going to cheat too and there were words and I don't want to see anyone ever again, well not for a week or two. I'm sure all these emotions will clear up by puberty, I've heard that childhood are the best years of your life so being a teenager must be brill.
Of course, once I am leader of the 5th Reich there will be a lot of burnings at the stake (with steak sauce), but that'll have to wait.

I made some beautifully demonstrative artwork in Minecraft and then Jof hugged me better and it's amazing what pasta and sleep can do, especially when I can help decorate the cup-cakes she decided to make for no apparent reason.

Choc to the System

At last, the inevitable happened and I had to go back to school. But then I got 16/16 in the maths test which was nice, as was the weather.

At some point soon many of us will be attending a residential course where we'll be away from home for several nights. I've done Scout camps so I'll be ok, Bud went to boarding school for 11 years and he says there's nothing wrong with him, but one of my colleagues has night terrors and I privately wonder if the teachers will be able to handle some of our livelier pupils, with their challenging quirks and celebrated differences. Perhaps there'll be a special dungeon with soundproofed cells for the screamers, and a nice island with its own Tory duck house-style chalet for the sleepwalkers.

Every term the teacher tells us what the next topic will be and mostly I forget instantly, assuming it will be Romans or Vikings or allied trades. This time they've told us it's going to be puberty. I have been warned about this, with its unwanted hair, unexplained angry bursts, nihilistic Gothic phases and new toiletry products. Now, menarche may not be my problem but it's got about 5 years earlier over the last century, which is bleedin' unreasonable in my book, cutting down your childhood like that.

In Super-Advanced Swimming I met Sydney and am scheduled to meet her every week, an additional bonus I wasn't expecting. Maybe one day we can swim together and practice diving. After swimming I was very tired and agreed to an early night.

Laser Soldiery @ the May Unfayre 2016

Even though I was still reading at 2330 last night, I was up for 0730 to play Minecraft. But because I'd not done as I was told and read in bed for only 5 minutes last night (instead of the 45 I chose to take), he said do a homework before you get on a screen.

I chose the time-related questionnaire which took me about 2 1/2 minutes (150 seconds) including sticking it into my homework book, so he made me do the bonus Numeracy 3 as well. Outside we could see the Early Morning Traffic Warden bringing joy to people's lives with his brightly coloured £30 fines for parking in a Monday-to-Saturday zone, even though it's clearly Bank Holiday Monday. We moved the car, and then noted later that he failed to come back and dispense tickety joy to the 10 cars in the 1 Hour Zone.

Jof kindly offered to drive me to the Fayre as a means of avoiding having to actually attend so we got there really early and went up and down each aisle of the Tacky-a-thon checking out all the stalls and recently-invented niche charities and aromatic fatty-substances wagons.

As you get older, your tastes and requirements change so the traditional merry-go-rounds with the single-seater fire engines and ambulances with the button you can press to make it go tweetle even louder go out of fashion. I also no longer wanted anything to do with the trampolines or the fun bus but we marked down the plate-smashing stall for future use and left a radar beacon on the AK-47-everyone's-a-winner tent.

I met Bradley (from my class) in the Marines Cadets, our Group Scout Leader, the guy from the Co-Op, Fridge Fraser from my old swimming group, and 3 others.

I got 5 Minecraft figurines but no Lego. I won a bottle of wine on the Tombola but didn't want to take penalties. I won a Katana sword but didn't want any sweeties. This is because I listened to the Dentist and desperately needed some worthless weaponry for the Puddle-Army competition on the playing field after the MAIN EVENT.

All year we look forward to Laser Soldiery because it is awesome in the extreme and we love it, regardless of actual ability. Eventually we all gathered under the Tree of Life for the Great Reckoning but not before we'd smashed some plates and won some plastic guns and had a burger and stroked the unreasonably obese rabbits. If you spend £3 on plate-smashing (with an option to kill Hitler) you get a Free French Resistance Fighter dolly, so we got 3.

The Somerstown Soap Dodgers were out in force, as were the Fratton Tattoo Appreciation Society, the Screaming Dribbling Toddler's Brigade, the Tipner Toothless Crew, allied with the Copnor Leather-Bikers and the Not-Quite-Human Gang of No Fixed Abode.

But we avoided the children killing each other with silly string and shot each other to bits in the Army Section and then gradually wandered off to the Rose in June Pub (as per tradition) although I'd got myself a self-inflicted huff which dissipated when Ben and I destroyed our rifles to see how small we could make them while they still went *Rattle* when you pulled the trigger. With extensive reverse engineering we found you could remove the entire gun, leaving only the trigger mechanism, so we tried to light the Free French Flic Poupee with the sparker and failed, but that kept us busy all the way home.

Some years go well, some don't. This year had all the ingredients, but somehow the spark was missing. Come back, Bobert, and associated sunshine. Nobody went on the horses.

It's an 'Orse, Mate

I knew Sunday was coming. It has been a source of angst, because I knew that I had a playdate booked with Flynn the Scout for Minecraft, Minecraft and yet more Minecraft, but I also knew there was a funfair thingy going on for the whole weekend on our glorious seafront.

Come, come, dear enchanting Demi-God Mungleton, I hear you cry, it's not so bad. But it is, because they wanted me to cycle down there and I was only prepared to go if I could be driven there.

This meant an ongoing battle and I hoped it would go away. Cycle or walk, they said, so I opted for walking, because I totally hate cycling, it's so boring. It was 1.9 miles, although privately I believed it to be 37, taking 3 1/2 hours. If I'd known the drudgery could have been over in 8 minutes had I chosen to cycle, I wouldn't have needed that ice cream to take my mind off how angry I was at the imposition of a 37 mile yomp.

Checking out the funfair, we met owls and hawks and donkeys and a man carving wood with a chainsaw and ponies and sheep and some kids having a throw-the-wellington-boot competition and geese and dog races and ferret races and there were multiple stalls of foodstuffs of all nations but I don't think they were allowed to cook the hawks and owls. I am too old for the helter-skelter and the carousel thing where the horses go round, and I don't drink beer. So I am in an in-between age bracket. This is possibly why I didn't see anyone I knew all day, and I know a lot of faces.

Suddenly a vast parade of ponies thundered past with their traps and they had time trials and I watched as they cantered round the course, cantilevering between traffic cones. Nearby were the Shire Horses and you can hire them for a wedding procession with posh carriages and Champagne, and I can tell you they have massive butts.

And that was pretty well it because I wasn't prepared to walk past the county show to the actual funfair by the War Memorial (which is where all the kids with plastic swords were coming from) so we did some rock-hopping in front of the Pyramids and found Canoe Lake (not Gnu Lake, that's in Kenya) where I took the chance to go bungee-trampolining again. I tried and tried but couldn't do a somersault, but who cares with all that laughter.

Jof took pity on my tired feet and we waited for a bus while Bud walked home to prove a point. He got home first but I consider myself the victor as I sat down all the way home. Later, Flynn came round and we played Minecraft, against all plans.

Excuse me while I kiss the Sky

Saturday is Acting Day and Syd emailed me to say she was making her own way there, I promptly forgot and got her "Create Account" screen ready and was miffed when she didn't turn up. I reckoned it was an ambiguous text, anyway, telling me she wouldn't be coming to my house.

In acting we walked to Her Dear Old Majesty's Royal Naval Dockyard and acted in Boathouse 6 instead. Hey, any gig is work. Then I took her back to mine which is increasingly the norm, all my schoolfriends are jealous that I have an actual girlfriend not one of the made-up ones some of them have invented in retaliation.

We Minecrafted for ages and had sandwiches and Nerf gun fights and crisps and met her mum in the park. Taking it in turns to use the new-fangled ball-wanger, we tired Bella the dog out with our antics and did some swinging and were only scared away by a sudden rainstorm.

Because Jof always has to cook (Bud is erratic in the kitchen) she decided to take us to the Hungry Horse pub thing up the Eastern Road, the one with the Pony Club soft play facility. It was busy, the possibility of extra clientele on a Saturday night escaping the management.

I got myself booked into the playzone which was lucky as we had to wait for well over an hour for the food on a table we cleared ourselves, not including the pile of pizza crusts on the floor below.

We finally managed to make the LED screen work and I took a snooker masterclass from my elders and worsers and I'm hoping for a Fu-Ding final. Bed 1047.