Some weeks are a grind. Sometimes its more than a week. Take this week for example. It’s the school holidays. This means that I’m not being woken by slamming car doors as the offspring are ferried to the school at the bottom of the road. (Yes, I am sometimes still in bed at 9am get over it) I don’t have a child but we borrowed my niece for the day and took her to a local wildlife reserve. She loves coming to visit as we usually take her out to some place like this (although the dead bodies in the Egyptian exhibit at the museum appear to have been a favourite to date…which is worrying on some levels). Those clever folks at the park had put on an Easter break treasure hunt of sorts so we spent three hours (with a 7 year old) searching for the hidden objects and all for the prize of a chocolate bar.

To be fair what amused us most was that she had lost a tooth the night before. An essential part of the ‘auntie visit’ is the sleepover. The tooth fairy had visited and, apparently, had left an ‘away from home’ bonus. The losing the tooth was not the funny part but the fact that she paid for the treasure hunt with one of the pound coins she had been left …. it was made clear that we were expected to reimburse her having failed to bring change to the nature reserve to pay for the treasure hunt. She held us to it too.

In other news our Prime Minister us is a convicted criminal along with his wife and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All of which added to the current war in Ukraine and a lack of oil and gas etc. meant that when a well known camping and outdoor retailer offered a tiny gas stove and refills for sale at a stupidly low price I had to go out to get one. Not wanting to waste fuel I called in en route to the swimming pool for dive training. Its a nice stove. My parents have had one for a while along with a generator. Their electricity goes off regularly (they’re in their 80s) and it allows them to make tea. This is the UK in the year 2022.

Next stop a water butt.