Sssh! Don't you know there's a War on?

At last, the Second World War came back to haunt us. Fortunately, we were prepared: and prepared Beef Stew au Ration.

Split into teams, we were given a potato (always say this in an Irish accent), a carrot (large) and we followed the recipe and chopped them up into a saucepan with water. The recipe said half a green stock cube but we put all of it in. The meat was corned beef which was authentic but also meant we didn't have to cook meat on school premises. The stew (not Disco Stu) was lumpy so we stabbed it with our steely knives and that put a hole in the bottom of the pot but at the end I reckon our Stew Rationale was the best, primarily because of the whole added stock cube. For all this we were in our Evacuee costumes. Nice people from Fort Nelson (the Cannon Museum) visited us and brought replicas of authentic toys-of-the-times such as the kicking man on the rope, and the spinning top on the string. Lego was missing, as were Samsung Galaxy 4G devices and i-Anythings.

Later I watched Youtube videos of a 'Tuber' driving a cyber-car over a cyber-bridge and crashing repeatedly. This was sufficient entertainment to make me A) wet myself laughing and B) get sent to my room for disturbing the peace.

Roast Challenge (with gravy)

Yet another maths test: this is getting wearisome. Surely there's no maths left by now? Only one pupil got 40/40, still not me: I am forever condemned to be the 38.5 also-ran, like the permanent bridesmaid.

So, of late, the school has been following the 'Roast me' meme and you can always find little knots of kids playing the roast challenge in the playground.

Once the gauntlet is thrown, Child A starts with 'Your nose is so long your mother uses it as a washing line', and Child B retaliates with 'Your butt is so big it has its own postcode'.

This continues with points scored for ever more fancy, contrived and earthy insults, and clearly I have simplified it for the ears of parents, who don't know the words we do.

But recently a little tiny baby Year 4 tried to join in (and gosh aren't these people so innocent and weedy) and of course was instantly floored by a terrible barrage of invective, so he went bawling to the office where parents were called and the Head Teacher has banned it forthwith On Pain Of Red Card.

Tomorrow we travel back in time to September 1939 and the evacuation of 3 and a half million people to the relative safety of the countryside. We are dressing up as wartime evacuees and so have to loiter on a train platform looking slightly lost and fearful: I have been provided with some kit and quite honestly, I feel like I'm right back in the Victorian Festival of christmas. At any point I might offer to clean out yer chimbley for sixpence, guv.

Colonic Interrogation

Well, the SAT test mocks just keep on coming. Today it was maths and maths with some arithmetic and a guest teacher from a local secondary school and a trainee teacher still at teacher school. But mostly it was maths.

The Lego League is not far away either and we worked hard on our missions. Like Mariner 1, a probe which crashed because of a missing minus sign in the code, one of our missions had stopped working.

After hours of code debug, we discovered that some helpful soul had changed a direction command from -5 to 6 but omitted the negative.

It would be just typical if on the day of the National Finals, our flagship Lego Robot (Flagbot?) set off, killed the pig, ejected both legs and fell over while singing the Peruvian national anthem because of some software glitch.

Because I haven't built enough recently, I am also working on a Minecraft Space Station with magic portals to a wooded environment below. This has a circular frame reminiscent of Star Trek: DS9 or the Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps there is a hidden meaning behind the appearance of a colon in both titles. Or not.

Then we rediscovered the leftover Cadburys chocolate selection boxes from the Scouts Xmas presents hidden in the garage. Hooray!

Ich bin heiss für dich

The week of SAT mock examinations continued. We will get our scores at the end of the week, something to look forward to.

But once the work was over we once again made our way to the heavily shielded computer core where we worked on our Lego cybernetic world dominators again. We all have our specialist roles and I am Chief Design Engineer.

This was a chance to get a group pic and also for me to show my alternative Lego creation which is perhaps half trebuchet, half disabled perambulator with a little bit of scorpionesque gynaecologist's chair thrown in. Not everything has to make sense.

At home the boilerman had turned up at last and was still there fighting with it. Now at last we are hot again and I look forward to a bath.

 

Too Fail to Big

A dreary and miserable day! It is lucky that I brighten the world just by being me.

In school we did some more Lego. In an ill-fated experiment to speed up our Lego Robot, we set the motor to 11 and it whizzed around. But it's supposed to perform tasks with the attachment (cunningly designed and built by me) and it slammed the grabber arm down with such force, the actual Lego broke, quite an achievement. I repaired it and we turned the motor down. I also made a non work-related Lego object and will take the camera in tomorrow to capture its likeness.

And because we are nearing our end-of-junior-school exams (SATs) we are doing mock examinations. Today we did English Comprehension with a 2-page passage and in-depth analysis of the text, and answers with evidence and so forth. They haven't been marked yet so I do not yet know if I am incomprehensible.

In Scouts I was a bit late and a Paramedic came to lecture us on saving lives. He taught us CPR: he said he did CPR on an old man and cracked one of his ribs, and if you shock them in the heart you only save 1 in 10 anyway.

And we all tried out CPR pumping and lung inflation on a dummy called Timmy. Timmy comes in a box called Little Annie, how posh. I guess being only a rubber dummy with slightly springy nipples, it can be a Timmy or an Annie depending on who's pumping it. Because I forgot to take my Little Scouting Book, I didn't get it signed off for my Paramedic badge, so I have to go to church parade on Sunday to get it signed there. Slightly against my religion, but what can you do.

And they've booked an hour's bellringing for a creative badge! This is in a church tower I've been to before - in fact, in the big picture at the top of the page I'm sitting in the bell room, looking down at the church from inside. That's where the Bell-Master sits so he knows when the priest has finished the service and they have to start ringing the bells. Look, there's me with the bells, from above.

Toast

I was the first up. Even though I lay there and contemplated, and read for half an hour, it was still ages until anyone else turned up.

Jof had to persuade me to eat breakfast, and put on trousers, and eat lunch. Apart from a brief stint doing homework, I played Minecraft and watched my tablet all day. Therefore the most interesting thing to happen all day was when we noticed that Jof had bought an industrial catering toaster, for when your busy idealized family just HAS to all eat 17 rounds of toast all at the same time. It has a defrost setting, giant levers and a hint of menace. I love it, for toasters are life. Yes, I lived in my dressing gown all day.

WTF Surinam

I apologize for some of the posts this week in which my superstar looks and winning smile were inexplicably missing, but sometimes I'd just be inventing a reason for a photo. Not so today.

So I'd had some croissants for breakfast, made even more delicious by strawberry jam purpose-stolen from a hotel in Majorca. And I moseyed into the dining room to play Minecraft and Bud was sorting out the latest delivery of funny foreign coins.

I have a collection of these, mostly started when we inherited some from Blind Uncle Len, and we always had a few of those old French coins and stuff in bottom drawers, the way we all do. But nowadays, every time we visit Lyndhurst or Chichester or Salisbury or Bognor, there are those special antique shops where you can riffle through the bucket of silly coins at 10p a go or buy the random Chinese take-away tub of coins for £5, and see what you get.

Over the period, we have gained many coins from countries far, some donated by friends, some collected off the street and some bought in shops for something to do. And whenever there is a new delivery, you sort them into countries, ditch the ugliest ones if you've got duplicates, then compare to the existing collection to see if you've got a new one, or a shinier version of one you've already got. Then you add it to the spreadsheet, and stick it in the little plastic wallet thing you can get from our mate in China and sent in the post.

So there is a process. And because this collection is nominally mine - Bud is just curating it for me, honest - I took an interest and sorted the Americas section and added them to the spreadsheet and inserted a line for the ones we didn't have, and determined that this one was shinier, and this one wasn't, and generally joined in with gusto, pyjamas and a magnifying glass.

And then we got one from Surinam, a square 5 Cent in faded aluminium. And we didn't have Surinam on the spreadsheet! I had to add a new country! I found this strangely exciting, oddly compelling. We now have over 2000 different coins, and laughed at the Belgians for having identical coins but some say Belgie and some say Belgique, and other little anomalies.

I tried on some clothes that Jof had got me for the 'Battle of Britain' topic - become a wartime evacuee. They are good, with a pretend tie and a baggy jumper. I already have the Cockney accent from my days as a Victorian chimney sweep.

Then we went to Portsmouth University. I am slightly too young to attend full-time but that is where Chinese Henry and his film director Gemma were holding auditions for a student film. The film is about a chap undergoing psychoanalysis and where the shrink has to say tell me about your mother and your childhood, they need some kid to play 'Younger Matthew', and I read the lines for the nice people and had to do it in a whiny voice and they liked me. But I won't find out if I've got the job for a while. We had to pay for a parking meter, silly given that we were a few hundred yards from my next appointment at the theatre. The Union was big and new and smelt of fags and there was a huge lounge with deckchairs.

At the theatre I met Sydney and we practised Wind in the Willows and stuff, and it was a good lesson. There is an audition for a Spielberg movie so I took the details. And while we were out, Bud had bought a knackered elderly suitcase for £5 out of an antique shop in Southsea so I have something to sit on, on the station platform waiting to take me to the countryside away from the Nazi blitz.

Even later, I met 26 other members of my Scout group for the swimming badge session. This event is at my old stomping pool and last time I did Badge #2 and that was fine but last year we didn't do it, just when I was being trained up by the proper swimming club. So this year I said stuff Badge #3, let's go straight onto Badge #4.

So I had to tread water for 5 minutes and do 5 lengths in 5 minutes and do 40 lengths without stopping and hold onto a float for 5 minutes and dive in a few times and Oh Dearie Me.

Due to certain talents I have, such as being wonderful and epic and so forth, I totally beasted it. I could have gone for Badge #5, roll on next year. James in my class did it too and Tall Luke, with whom I did the night-hike, tried Badge #5 but struggled, and won. The Badge-Meister will be busy tonight! Then we had 45 minutes of messing around with frog-shaped floats and diving etc, hooray. The boys' changing room was packed afterwards: only 2 people thought their way around the problem and used the ladies' changing room (no Scouts are ladies, ergo no occupants). The swimming pool was built 117 years ago for the Royal Marines, barracks just up the road. And the officers' changing room is now the ladies. That is why it's 4 times bigger and you could play tennis in it. On the way home we saw a head-on crash involving a Dominos' delivery car where the fronts of both vehicles were all squished up.

At home, Jof had made us a roast dinner and we hoovered it up like very hungry deserving people eat godly ambrosia.

Swings and Bandicoots

Thank me it's Friday! Anyway, I got 8/10 on the spelling test, getting 'Circumference' right, thanks to Grandad, who we forgot to phone this afternoon.

In PE, it was modern dance again in which we watched 'Thriller' by Michael Jackson: everybody in the class was freaked out by the rhythmic bleeding zombies and free-styling sodding corpses. In literacy we wrote our persuasive letters with drop-in clauses and parentheses and relative clauses (Santa Clauses not available at this time) and further grammatical semantic discussions.

We did our poster for the Battle of Britain topic: mine has a hammer on an idealized table with a corner peeled back to reveal the legend "Work Your Way To The Top" in true Soviet style.

In gardening we weeded and made cloches and planned our compost heap and all our seeds have gotten mouldy over the winter. Therefore we need a fresh batch of seeds and Bud said I've got just the seeds for you, but don't eat the fruits, mmm. I dug up some roots and Child B dug up a daffodil bulb and thought it was a dead rat.

Objects in Mirror are Stupider than they Appear

Well, it's really starting to heat up in the Red and Yellow Card area. We now have 4 Reds in our class (not under the bed) and other classes have their contenders. Again, the usual suspects are the ones attracting the attention.

But now we have a new source of cards: some might say reminiscent of the strategically placed 'Cash Cow' road speed cameras. Our new pencil cases have a plethora of stringent rules surrounding their use, contents and storage. You can't touch anybody else's case, lose an item, add an unlicensed interloper, steal an item to replace one you lost, or sharpen your pencil too enthusiastically, thereby shortening its allotted lifespan. We have weekly inventory inspections. I can say, however, that they are all labelled with the splendid labels Bud brought home from his last work, making him an accessory.

We are approaching the mock mock maths exams: soon we will be doing the SATs and are preparing to sit a practise exam, for which we are getting practise. I have the 3rd best grade-point average, and that's not a post-truth alternative fact, it's all there on the averages.

And apropos of nothing, we all have intestinal gas that we must rid ourselves of, some more weaponized than others. Others may choose to release a series of little gaseous anomalies in the hope of evading detection, but I prefer to discharge a single methane maelstrom, preferably when sitting on Jof, poor girl.

Blue Ice

It was a normal-ish day at school until the blue ice dropped from the sky. Like the Michael Caine film of the same name, this suggests an unexpected event such as the frozen flushings of an aircraft lavatory landing on you. Of course, planes do not routinely jettison their bilges, they have them hoovered out at the airport. It's trains that say please do not flush in a station.

I may not run marathons or Scout cross-country races but I certainly run about in breaktime. It's the usual story, Child A chases Child B, then vice versa. But this time I tripped over a discarded school jumper and twisted my ankle. Child B laughed at me which makes him more of a C.

Jof was summoned and had to leave work and she took me home and administered the magic Calpol and before long I was bouncing around again, not just because it was Lego building in the afternoon. So I got a free lift back, and a free lift home again, to give my injured limb a rest. Ironically, the only lesson I missed was PE, which I wouldn't have been able to do anyway. So here is an unrelated picture from Scouts a couple of days ago where we bandaged ourselves up and claimed horrific injuries.