Look at this! Phoawr! How's them onions for a new school.

 

Not quite yet, in two years time. And there's me complaining about the lack of investment in schools. Now I can see where all the money's gone. So, if you've a leaky roof, too many porta-cabins, heating that won't work or smelly drains... Betcha envious :-)

BTW: I sent this post in via email. It's just so much quicker, even for one picture.

We get there late, as we missed a train, and there's track works at the weekend... And get home at nearly 1am! It's a tiring old day, but we see a lot, though not the State Rooms at Buck Palace, which is important for Esme. But we do get onto the London Eye, which makes us late to the return train. A Big Bus tour of the capital is also good, though both Es and Brad are more interested in the various and multi-coloured stretch limos they spy on route than the architecture and sights.

Another Bradley moment happens on the Embankment. They push through to the front of a large crowd gathered around an Australian juggler. He's telling jokes as he builds up the suspense for his coming stunt. Four stout geezers are drawn from the crowd to hold ropes, then he spied Brad and asks him to come forward.

Brad steps into the ring, surrounded by the clapping audience. After a few jokes at Brad's unknowing expense. He offers him a five pound note if he helps him... Or, a girlfriend, and points to a young girl who must have been in on a joke a while back. "Bradley, which one do you want, the £5 or the girl?" Brad immediately and authoritatively points to the £5, everybody laughs.

Now... I know that Brad has too many girlfriends. He's always getting girlfriends. He can't even remember all their names. His natural, indifferent honesty makes it easy for him to continually ask nearly every girl he meets, if they'd like to be his girlfriend.

OTH Brad knows that a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards are £5. And if he eats his cabbage, he'd need to eat it 10 times before he could afford to by a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards at 50p a sitting. A whole five pound note is exactly what he needs.

A few more jokes, several rounds of applause and Brad's sent back to the crowd, with £5 and the biggest widest, most content grin.

All the rest of the day he pulls his five pounds out unfolds it, and tells those that are close enough the story. His first, earned, not given, not won, five pounds. His very first.

 

We've had this book out several times. I must buy it! £4.99 at Amazon and 50p cheaper at Tescos book shop. I like reading it loud out in my full Shakespearian thespian over dramatic play acting, projecting to the back of the auditorium voice.

Rufus Skumskins O'Parsley wouldn't eat supper unless it was ghastly.
Wormcast butties, tubes of glue, pans of slugs in slimy stew.
Bogey burgers, brown rat roast,
Fat black tadpoles squashed on toast.
Washed down with a cup of string.
Can you imagine such a thing?

Friday takes us to Telford Town Library. We've not been for ages. Lots of good books to read, I hoped. Sadly, I think that only The Rascally Cake is worth reading more than once. In fact we must have read it 10 or fifteen times over the course of this weekend.

Over the weekend, we've been attacked.

 

I rather think of myself as a soldier in a bunker, on the Maginot Line. Or The Somme. With barbed wire fences and no man's land. Mines and booby traps protect me as I slumber. Constantly, I'm being tested and probed. Bullets whistle harmlessly over my head. Shells explode in my sandbags.

Now and then, they find a chink in my armour, a gap in my defences. And unless I can put my finger in the dam, we'll be over run soon.

This one. I've had before. An attack of the crazies. They come in, squawking in tongues. Can't understand a word. Totally harmless except that they're the enemy.

I've blocked them before. I'll have to figure the pattern and block them again. But the utter pointlessness, the lack of a real domain just makes me weep for the idiocy of spam warfare, the lost time.