The Good Ship Mungo

Back in October of last year, we had a special memo from the school telling parents that we would be walking to the seafront, learning about coastal erosion, and floating our boats on Canoe Lake as part of our "Waterworld" topic.

My boat (The Good Ship Mungo, powered by a Helium Confusion Reactor and based on an interstellar vessel of the same name that first flew in 2089) has been stuck on a shelf in the Art cupboard for the intervening period.

Due to adverse weather conditions, this trip never happened. But today, it did. Amazingly, everyone else knew it was a non-uniform day even though it clearly states 'comfortable shoes with their normal school uniform' on the order sheet.

We walked down to the swimming pool, and meandered along the very long beach road and stopped off for some fun at the park and floated our boats. I was not allowed pictures of this event but I can tell you that mine floated really well but as we were all stationed the wrong side of the lake (for the wind direction) they could only bump into the side again and it was all rather unsatisfactory. One of my schoolfriends had to have the boat that Jof made - I renamed it the Capsizing Disaster but that wasn't fair as it did float.

After we'd walked all the way back again, my feet were throbbing like Rudolph's nose in the hayfever season. I reckoned we'd done 6 miles but I could be wrong.

On the way home, I stopped off for a minimally invasive procedure, the agreed haircut. Here is a selfie from the beach trip as a 'Before' image, and one from afterwards. If I grow my hair I look like I've got my own Van de Graaff generator so mostly I go for the good old Grade 2. This time, I asked for short sides and a bit more on top. She thought I'd be too old for a lollipop. Wrong again. Incidentally, one of the giant tennis balls got a puncture so had to be thrown away. Never mind, it only cost £5 and we've had months of use - and we've got a second one. In Scouts we learned about Leprosy.

Jof made a special supper for Bud. Knowing that the chilli sauce you get in the shops is never hot enough, but NOT knowing that the specially purchased "Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce" IS, she added a less scientific 'Glop' or was it a 'Blotch' or a 'Glug' to the sausage-in-beans casserole instead of the more usual 4-8 drops. Never mind, at least there's always a pizza and 17 toilet rolls in the freezer, and the knowledge that the noxious fumes emanating from the saucepan made her sneeze 11 times in a row and she had to sit down.