Flour Power

‘Home Economics’, two words that struck dread into the hearts of most of the first year boys at my school. Apart from one or two who preferred needlework and making light fluffy sponges and well, they were considered a bit on the strange side anyhow. The rest of us would have much rather been in metal work making the kind of sharp, pointy implement that would give Rambo wet dreams.

It wasn’t that we hated the lesson as such, at the end of it you got to sample the things everyone else had made and on the whole the recorded fatalities from Salmonella and Botulism were in the low double digits. No, it was simply that the double period on a Tuesday morning was stiflingly boring, made even more so by Mrs Cash, our Home Economics tutor being the most safety conscious person in the whole world and not letting us anywhere near anything vaguely sharp as well as insisting we wore the kind of outfits more at home in the chemistry labs where at least there were substances that could bring about horrible and agonising death. In Home Economics the worst that could happen would be a fellow pupil running amok with a potato masher.

Suffice it to say we tried desperately to banish the boredom but all our attempts seemed doomed to failure. The tabletop finger soccer match using dried peas came to an abrupt halt when an over enthusiastic corner kick ricocheted off the blackboard and into the batter mix Mrs Cash was showing us how to make resulting in a ban on dried peas. The Spaghetti catapult incident led to just about everything being banned apart from flour and what harm could flour do?

As it happens, quite a lot in the wrong hands! In the hands of a baker it can be made into succulent, crisp crusted loaves or indulgent cakes. In the hands of a bunch of schoolboys it becomes a near lethal weapon.

It was a dreary November day and we were supposed to be making rock cakes when Mrs Cash was called away to attend an incident in the gym in her other role as stand in school nurse when the real one was incapacitated due to her medicinal brandy habit or on ‘holiday’ due to the same. Now was the time for mischief but what could we do? We had no sharp implements so murder and torture were out of the question. All we had was flour, water, margarine and currants and barring covering the class swot in ‘Stork’ there wasn’t much else we could do. It was Gavin who suggested the ‘pillar of flame’, as he had seen it done by some lads in the council flats where his aunt lived. All we needed was a stairwell, a bag of flour and matches and we had all three. As a precaution, just in case someone got a bit too enthusiastic with the flambé the classroom had a fire exit that led to a concrete stairwell, we had bags of flour and given the smoking habits of half the boys in the school there was no shortage of matches and lighters either.

The method of making the ‘pillar of flame’ was easy, someone, in our case Gavin, stood at the top of the stairs and shook flour down through the stairwell, someone at the bottom, Andy, threw a match into the descending flour and the result was a pleasing pillar of flame. All very spectacular the first two times we did it but we had failed to notice that not all the flour burnt and the air was getting thick with dust. On the third attempt Gavin, perhaps trying to impress may have shaken a bit too much as when the match was hurled the result was not so much ‘pillar of flame’, more ‘wrath of God’. In fact it may be that the whole ten commandments and burning bush thing was less a religious experience than a couple of Israelites arsing about with wheat based products when Moses arrived on Mount Sinai.

Fortunately most of us were shielded by the stairs and only received a superficial scorching but Gavin who had been leaning over the edge of the top banister took the full force of the flaming column that ignited with an audible ‘WHOMPH’ that rattled the door at the base of the stairs. This was followed by noises that could only be described as a strangled “Argh!” and a slightly louder “SHIIIITE!” We raced to the top of the stairs to find Gavin standing in a state of total shock, his face red, missing his eyebrows and with wisps of smoke rising from his hair. Below us Andy was frantically stamping on his white coat that had gone a distinctly sooty colour. Quickly we bundled Gavin back into the classroom and stuck his head under the tap at one of the sinks…just as Mrs Cash arrived back from whatever emergency had occurred in the gym to find us apparently trying to drown one of our number whilst another stood gazing forlornly at a coat that appeared to have been put in the oven at gas mark four.

As she stood staring in disbelief at the now soaking and eyebrow-less Gavin it was possible to see her struggling with how to phrase “What the fucking hell is going on here you little bastards?” in terms that could be delivered to a bunch of 11 and 12 year old children. It was left to Martin, always one to come up with a good answer to say

“It was the oven Miss, the gas must have been on and when he tried to light it there was an explosion. You really ought to get the caretaker to check it out, we might have been killed.”

That it was only the boys that had apparently come to close to death was probably what led to her being less convinced of this than she was that we had been mucking around with the ovens. As a result we got to spend the rest of the lesson copying out recipe books whilst frantically praying that she would have no need to go to the fire exit stairwell which was covered in flour and scorch marks and that we could blame the devastation on the 3rd form who had the lesson after ours.

Atomic Fireball II

You might have thought we had learnt our lesson. Messing around with things that go bang is not a good idea especially when it earns you a walloping from your friends grandfather for half destroying his greenhouse and most of his prize winning vegetables. However, the lesson had obviously not sunk in as a year after doing just that Stuart, Sanjeev and myself were once again dabbling in the dark arts of making things go ‘BOOM!’

My parents and I had moved earlier in the year and were living on the upper floors of my grandparents large Georgian House whilst our new house was being extensively redecorated to remove the kind of wallpaper that even by the middle of the 70s was considered hideous and brown, the like of which can only be seen nowadays in re-runs of ‘The Sweeney’ or ‘Life on Mars’, that the previous owners had so loved. This in turn meant that I was living close to Sanjeev and Stuart, my friends who lived close to my grandparents.

For some reason that summer the craze amongst the local boys was not bubblegum card collecting or something equally safe and not likely to end up in hideous death. It was making bangers from the metal tubes inside pens or small pieces of copper pipe. Naturally being the good, well-behaved lads we were we stayed away from such pursuits and played chess or read encyclopaedias in our spare time. Sorry, that would be a bare-faced lie. We blew stuff up by filling the tubes with scraped matches, crimping the ends and throwing them onto small fires we had built round the back of the derelict church hall just like everybody else.

They made quite impressive bangs and on the whole there were surprisingly few fatalities but then things started to get a bit competitive between us and a couple of the other gangs of neighbourhood kids who also hung round the back of the hall to blow stuff up. In fact it was not so much competitive as an arms race in miniature and we were determined to go nuclear first.

Now getting hold of the Plutonium and other stuff that goes into an atomic bomb was a bit beyond us as ten year olds even if Sanjeevs' dad did work at the local university so we improvised. As it would happen plumbers working on some new houses nearby had left several six inch lengths of one inch copper pipe lying around and these were duly purloined and after using my granddads tools to bend and seal one end, filled with a mixture of gunpowder from the bangers Stuart always seemed to have, all our available supplies of plastic caps, a Vesuvius fountain Sanjeev had saved from the previous years Guy Fawkes party and about three large boxes worth of scraped match heads. In fact, come that Autumn my mother could be constantly heard complaining that all the matches to light the fire seemed to have disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. I of course denied all knowledge. We soon had two ‘bangers’ that were in hindsight, not so much bangers as improvised weapons of mass destruction that nowadays would have the US marines storming our houses under cover of mass airstrikes and an artillery barrage to make sure they did not fall into the wrong hands.

Now, not wanting to seem like right lemons in front of the other kids if our handiwork failed to go boom in a satisfying way we decided that one of them should be sacrificed in a test run much like the Manhattan Project had tested the first atom bomb in the desert. We unfortunately did not have a desert or a test rig. What we did have was the back of Sanjeevs granddads shed and a largish plant pot. Looking back, spending our pocket money on a flight to the Mojave might have been a good idea. We filled the pot with paper, wood and anything else vaguely flammable and added a dash of methylated spirits just to make sure, rested the ‘banger’ with the least amount of our explosive mixture in it across the pot, flung in one of the few matches we had not turned into headless sticks and ran for cover.

We waited and waited a bit longer, none of us were about to go back and then suddenly:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!

The detonation was far louder than any of us had expected and a not insubstantial mushroom cloud of smoke rose behind the shed. “Yes, it had worked, we could go down to the church hall and show the other kids…hang on, why was there still smoke pouring from behind the shed ?”

Did I forget to mention that this was 1976? The summer had been hot and dry, roads had melted, people were frying eggs on the bonnet of their Ford Capri and the vegetation behind the shed was tinder dry. The explosion had shattered the plant pot and scattered flaming debris amongst the weeds and now flames were licking up the side of the shed. In a moment of the kind of blind panic that only ten year old boys who have just committed an act of inadvertent arson can have we ran back into the house desperately searching for something to put the flames out, totally ignoring the fact that right next to the shed was the garden hose. Anyhow, we had all heeded the dire warnings about not wasting water under pain of horrible death and a stern telling off from the government minister for drought.

In full fire fighting mode we pelted back out clutching a soda siphon and a number of bottles of Panda Pop lemonade that anyone who grew up in the 70s will tell you, were pretty useless at quenching thirst let alone fighting fires due to their rather small size. Desperately we squirted and poured only to be surrounded by clouds of steam smelling vaguely of burnt sugar but the blaze continued. It was perhaps lucky that Sanjeevs dad chose that moment to come home and that he had the presence of mind to totally ignore the dire water wasting warnings and get stuck in with the garden hose whilst we stood guiltily back and tried to pretend that we were not really there.

Five minutes later the fire was well and truly out although the end of the shed looked worse for wear and a swathe of the garden was well and truly crisped. Sanjeevs dad, who was one of the politest and well spoken people I had ever encountered stood looking at us as if unable to say what he was really thinking until finally he managed to slowly and with precise pronunciation say

“What is the meaning of this……..bloody outrage?”

It was no use denying it, we were caught red handed, bang to rights and could not even claim it was caused by plummeting space junk as Stuart had a box of matches, albeit mainly headless, in his pocket. The remainder of that summer holiday was spent reading encyclopaedias and playing chess as we were not allowed outside without parental supervision. Oddly enough though, whilst lying in bed one night the air was rent by an almighty bang from a nearby street. Either our remaining ‘banger’ had found its way into enemy hands or one of the other gangs of kids had managed to up the ante a bit. Whatever it was, ten minutes later I heard sirens and could swear I could smell slightly burnt sugar.

Bow Woe

As a child living in the 70s I had rather a lot of weapons. In the days before political correctness if you were a boy you were pretty much likely to have a toy cupboard filled with Action Men, Airfix soldiers, toy cars and an assortment of weapons. I probably had more than my fair share. In fact I could have probably armed a small country had the toy guns I owned been real. Just about every scenario in the games we played was covered. Cowboys: set of cap firing six shooters and a Winchester. Knights: Three swords and a very useful battle axe that came pretty tight if you swung it just right. Foreign Legion: Replica Enfield .303. Soldiers: Couple of Thompsons, a Colt .45 Automatic, an MP40 and if there was a shortage of evil Nazi officers I could even provide a Luger and march around saying “Zo Englander pigdog, you sought you could ezcape! Vell zink again!”, just like they did in the comics. Even if we were playing James Bond I had a Walther PPK as well.

Many of the weapons could as my mother was fond of saying “put someone’s eye out!” Some fired ping pong balls, others plastic pellets and one of the Thompsons and an Airfix FN SLR even fired pretty chunky replica bullets…or bits of sawn down pencil if you really wanted to bring realistic pain and suffering to the games of war.

However, the sight of a gang of lads and in some cases girls as well, charging round the streets, fields or through gardens caused no reaction whatsoever. We could run about playing soldiers, toting in some cases quite realistic weaponry without an eyebrow being raised or a couple of vanloads of firearms officers arriving to arrest us, fingerprint us and deport us to Guantanamo Bay. A ten year old with a ‘Tommy gun’ was a fairly common sight and certainly did not mean that a drive by shooting was about to go down or a drug deal done behind the allotment sheds. In fact the only interaction with the police was if the local bobby happened to be passing and asked us to keep the noise down a bit if we got a little too boisterous in our machine gun and grenade imitations or as happened on one occasion he saw my replica FN and commented that he had used one just like it when he was in the army.

The one thing I did not have was a bow and arrow. At least not until my grandmother decided to bring one back from a holiday jaunt during the summer of 1973 to complement the ‘Red Indian’ outfit with it’s tomahawk and rubber scalping knife she had bought the previous Christmas. Naturally the first thing my mother said on seeing it and it’s sucker tipped arrows was “Be careful, you could have someone’s eye out with that!”

So, the first thing I did was head out into the garden and find my friend Ross who was playing out in his garden that backed onto ours. Now, in our garden there grew a plant that when it died back left tough, woody stalks. These stalks made perfect arrows and it was not long before they were utilised as such, being fired around with not much care as to what they hit. It was not long either before mum, seeing that we were stalking each other through the shrubbery with arrows now tipped with sharp bits of slate from an old tile, came rushing out and confiscated our lethal weapons. However, on seeing our glum faces she relented and said we could have the bow back as long as we used it properly and in a safe manner. Properly and safe meant indoors with the plastic sheet target it had come with stuck to the back of the kitchen door.

The bow was quite powerful, probably in order to make the sucker tipped arrows stick to the target and we soon found that if you pulled it to full stretch a really satisfying, door rattling thud was the result and it was all quite safe. Or would have been if dad had not been in the habit of using the gate at the end of the garden to come via when he returned from work instead of having to walk an extra hundred or so yards around the end of the houses up to the main road and use the front door.

I had just stretched the bow to it’s fullest extent and let fly with the arrow from a kneeling position like I had seen in a recent swashbuckling Robin Hood film shown one Sunday afternoon when the kitchen door swung open and dad, half reading the evening paper wandered into sight only to take an incredibly well aimed arrow travelling at some speed in the groin. Any pain might have ended there had our cat, Sally not also wandered in to the kitchen at that point only to have dad stagger backwards and stand on her tail as she stopped to stuff her face with cat food on the way to her favourite spot on the back of the sofa.

Sally was quite a calm, placid cat but being trodden on unleashed the psycho-kitty within and from outside the door we watched as she raced around the kitchen in a clawing, biting, spitting fury as dad clutched his groin with one hand and tried to fend the demon possessed feline off with the other. It was a little like watching a live action version of Tom and Jerry as Sally hurtled around knocking cooking implements, spice jars, crockery and condiments flying as dad tried to batter her away with the newspaper. It lasted perhaps ten seconds at most before she fled through the cat flap and streaked up the garden leaving dad standing in a kitchen that appeared to have been the scene of a small war.

It was at that moment that mum chose to arrive home having gone to visit the corner shop at the end of the road only to find her kitchen a scene of total devastation, apparently caused by dad having gone utterly mental with a folded newspaper. Ross and I meanwhile decided to beat a tactical retreat and headed over to the fields where some more of our friends were playing ‘Knights of the Round Table’. A much safer game…at least until we turned up with my bow and a handful of plant stalks and suggested it became Robin Hood.

The perils of portaloos

It was a moment of teenage rebellion that caused me to become an archaeologist. Dad had wanted me to join his old RAF squadron so that I could travel overseas and, as the old slogan went, “meet new and exotic people, then drop bombs on them” but I had other ideas. Despite my military obsessed childhood I was not quite ready to hurtle round the skies like Tom Cruise with a bloody silly nickname like ‘Mongoose’ or ‘Chinchilla’. It was possibly down to a bit of an incident with a training aircraft in my cadet days and the probability that the RAF would not let me anywhere near anything expensive ever again that did it. Thus it was to my dads eternal disgust that I became an archaeologist or as he put it “a bloody gypsy”.

Now those of you that have watched ‘Time Team’ will know all about archaeology or at least the sanitised version of it. Archaeology is all about digging holes in the most disgusting conditions known to man. Invariably it is cold and wet, warm and wet or if you are really lucky the hottest summer in living memory where you can fry eggs on the environmental team and people are dying of sunstroke just by thinking of being outdoors. The ground is either so hard you need a drill to get through it, or as one former colleague had experienced, dynamite or is so wet entire surveying teams have vanished into the quagmire never to be seen again. No excavation can call itself a success unless at least three of the excavators have been lost to drowning or heat stroke. Most digs were out in the arse end of nowhere although there was usually a pub nearby, odd that, and free time was either spent in tents that were trying to launch themselves skyward in a force 8 gale or getting steadily rat-arsed in the pub on the pokiest real ale you could find. If you were lucky the group you were working for had a ‘diggers hostel’, which is a bit like a student hall but with a constant aroma of week old cabbage, last nights curry, stale farts and damp dungeons and dragons player. Far too many archaeologists either played D&D or were involved in live action role playing or historical battle re-enactment societies so there was also a high risk of death by tripping over someone’s battle axe or flintlock when heading to the toilet to get rid of the copious amounts of real ale everyone consumed to help aid in forgetting the positively grim conditions we lived in. Then there were the Portaloos…

Even out in the middle of nowhere we had to have a Portaloo, probably to stop bearded, real ale drinking wannabe orc slayers peeing in the bushes or vanishing into copses with a wad of leaves and scaring the local wildlife. However, without fail the Portaloos were absolutely foul. Those of you reading this that have ever been to a festival should imagine the worst toilets there, multiply it by ten then plonk the whole lot in the middle of the Somme circa 1916 on a wet Sunday and you probably wouldn’t be close even then. They went far beyond the word ‘minging’ and well into the territory of banned by several biological warfare treaties. That however did not stop Rick our finds supervisor from disappearing into one for several hours at a time with a copy of the Guardian that cunningly concealed a gentlemen’s periodical of the kind where young ladies were displayed artistically and requests were made of gentlemen readers to provide photographic illustrations of their nearest and dearest. Okay, why beat about the bush, it was a copy of ‘Razzle’ or some similar top shelf fare and Rick would vanish for several hours to read the paper and have what was known as a “leisurely J. Arthur” over Deirdre (44-28-32) from Bolton.

We had been excavating one particular site for several weeks. It lay at the top of a hill and as we expanded ever outward in our search for bits of grubby pottery and stains on the ground that might indicate an iron age settlement the Portaloos were steadily pushed back towards the edge of the site until they were precariously close to the steep side of the hill. That however, did not bother us, they were perfectly safe, after all, our resident ‘engineer’ John had shored them up with some old railway sleepers from a nearby farm and a bit of drystone walling. As long as you did not practice tap dancing in one then you were perfectly safe and to be honest there were not a lot of tap dancers on site and nor could you swing a broadsword in one either. Thus, most of us were pretty safe.

Perhaps the couple of days of almost continuous rain played its part but that will never be known, what is known is that Rick would probably not have visited the Portaloos, Guardian tucked under his arm had he known what was about to happen.

It was a site joke that if you saw a gently swaying Portaloo you knew that Rick was in residence and this morning was no different. About half an hour after he had vanished, just enough time to scan through the paper the toilet began to shake ever so slightly, then over the course of the next half hour it began to wobble a bit more and a bit more as the delights of Deirdre and her fellow readers wives had an effect. Suddenly the stones and railway sleepers began to shift. A few of us spotted it and were dashing to warn Rick when the Portaloo slowly toppled backwards as the ‘engineering’ supporting it gave way. From within came a strangled howl as the whole lot vanished from view over the edge of the hill. As we reached the edge of the hill we were rewarded with the sight of the runaway toilet crashing into a bramble patch and coming to rest against the fence that ran along the base of the hill. About five seconds after it did, the door flew open and with a blood curdling “AAARRGGH!” Rick popped up like a demented Jack in the box, or would have if Jack in the boxes popped up with their jeans and underpants round their ankles, a rapidly fading erection and were covered in the assorted waste products donated by forty or so real ale swilling, bearded, battle re-enacting archaeologists who had not crapped in a hedgerow for weeks.

Naturally, being the kind concerned lot we were we did not stand at the top of the hill almost bent double with laughter at the sight of Rick, covered in shit, ‘Mr Floppy’ out for all to see standing in a crashed Portaloo in the middle of a bramble patch with a look of mortal terror on his face and clutching a soggy, toilet roll festooned copy of ‘Fiesta’. Of course we did not, we were far too mature to do such a thing. Well, maybe we laughed just a bit and one of our number having an asthma attack because she was laughing so much was nothing to do with it. Honestly!

Funnily enough after that the Portaloos were kept well away from the edge of the site and Rick, well, let’s just say he did not spend half as much time in them, perhaps just enough time to read the paper without the distractions of the ample charms of Deirdre causing him any further woe.

Matchbox mayhem

Another Christmas has long gone, the last morsel of Turkey eaten and the kids have already grown bored with their Wiis, DSes and overpriced movie tie in tat. It wasn’t always like that was it? Well, yes it was but back then in those less safety conscious halcyon days of the 70s we found other uses for our Christmas presents that extended their life in interesting ways.

Apart from having far too many military based toys I also owned a huge collection of toy cars. Mainly they were from Matchbox but there were a fair few Corgi, Dinky and lesser brands in there as well. Apart from RTAs on my town builder play mat or in 1975 re-enacting Death Race 2000 with the Airfix OO scale civilians that were supposed to go with my train set there was not a lot else I could do with them other than leaving them on the stairs in the hope a parent or relation might take a Tom and Jerry inspired tumble. That was until my father bought a set that involved yellow tracks and a battery powered motor in what looked like a cash register with gears that propelled the cars around the track. Unless you had two of these you were doomed to watching the cars zip around the track until the batteries ran out or you got bored and went to overdose on Corona Limeade for a sugar rush.

It was boring until Christmas 1974 when my mate Ross and I both got the same present, a car launcher for Matchbox cars. Basically a blue plastic box containing an industrial strength rubber band attached to a cocking lever that you attached to your track, pulled the lever back bunged a car in and pressed a button on the top of thus launching the car at high speed down the track. It was great! Cars hurtled out at phenomenal speeds. In fact I’m not sure that some did not hit the magical speed of eighty-eight miles an hour and blink out of existence in a flash of light and a flaming trail only to re-appear in 1955. It was also a lethal weapon in the hands of an eight year old boy.

Bored with launching cars we decided to try launching other things. Things like stones from the drive, things that as our parents would put it, “Could have someone’s eye out with that!” Both our mothers were out, trusting us in those pre-pervert on every corner and underage criminality days to behave ourselves for an hour whilst they did the weekly shop on the high street.

The stones were particularly successful and for an hour or two we ranged around the big back garden wielding what were effectively miniature ballistas, blasting chunks out of trees and the compost heap with Ross’s dads drive. Then, bored with destroying flora and fauna we wondered what else we could try and hit upon the idea of using them for their original purpose, launching cars but not down tracks. No, in the absence of either of us owning an Evel Knievel set or even a Ricochet Racer we would use them to re-create daredevil stunts by launching toy cars over the garden pond. There wasn’t much chance of us losing the cars as a) the pond wasn’t very deep and b) Ross’s dad had covered it with chicken wire after an incident involving a local Heron and two hundred or so missing goldfish so if the cars fell short they would hardly get damp in the half inch of water above the net.

Propping the launcher on a convenient stone looted from the rockery we took our first shot and Ross’s ‘Tanzara’ flew clear over the pond and into the shrubs beyond. Cool! My ‘Blue Lightning’ followed and then we had a brief falling out in our friendship. I wanted to fire my ‘Wildcat Dragster’ next but Ross wanted another shot with his ‘Tanzara’ as it looked most like an Evel Knievel car. This resulted in a bit of push and shove, not a good idea with a loaded weapon, sorry, toy car launcher when you are standing outside the patio doors that lead to the dining room. About five seconds into our argument there was a noise that sort of went…

THWWWWOCK – CRASH – TINKLE - SMASH

If, at that moment the word ‘Arsebiscuits’ had been invented we would have said it. The launcher had fired, the car had gone through one of the panes of glass in the door and what was worse had also taken out half of a set of sherry glasses that were about six billion years old and had been passed down through the family through generations. We were, once again deep in the proverbial doo-doo. Unless we could make it look like we had nothing to do with it. It was then that eight year old cunning kicked in. Everybody had a coal fire what with global warming having not yet been invented, the ashes went into the bin along with lumps of what my father always called ‘clinker’, bits of coal and stone that had fused together in the heat of the fire. Selecting a roughly table tennis ball sized piece we hurried indoors, located the car and left the ‘clinker’ in its place. With this we fled the scene of the crime and headed for the local park on our bikes.

We returned an hour or two later to find Ross’s mum in the dining room clearing up the glass and asked where we had been replied semi-truthfully “At the park.”

“So you don’t know anything about this then?” she asked brandishing the piece of ‘clinker’. For a moment our lives hung in the balance, would one of us crack in a moment of George Washington style “I cannot tell a lie”? It was Ross who spoke first:

“Cor! Is that a piece of meteorite? It must have come from space and smashed through the window. Lucky we were not playing in the garden it might have hit us!”

I’m not entirely sure if his mum believed us but without the proof we were innocent until proven guilty and Ross kept up the pretence by asking if he could keep the bit of meteorite so he could take it in to school the next day only to quietly dispose of the evidence just in case his mum had managed to invent DNA evidence twenty odd years ahead of time.

Apologies for the delay

Just a quick post to say apologies for not posting any tales for a while. Unfortunately due to work commitments and trying to strike a work/life balance that isn't 85% work I have not had a lot of time to update on here. However, when I get time I am continuing to write so expect a new batch of tales sometime in the future including the dangers of Portaloos and why kids and toy cars really should not mix.