At Home with the Gavins

Brendan, Shirley and Eloise returned from Colchester to find Lyra and I ensconced in their living room, and we took a walk to survey Ipswich's premier playground facilities, those at Christchurch Park's very own Hippy Hill.

When I was a callow youth, as opposed to a callow adult, it was my regular and usually drunken pleasure to scale the fences of Christchurch Park with drinking companions and play silly games on Hippy Hill and occasionally the playground.

Nowadays those harmless activities would be stymied in all probability not only by the pervasive closed-circuit surveillance regime of the Police State but by the wildflower meadows which have taken the place of the mown grass - making rolling down the hill in a drunken fugue next to impossible - and by the modern child-safe playground facilities with their shock absorbing surfaces - which make throwing stones that are no longer there rather difficult.

I suppose you can't fight progress and in compensation for the reduced teenage misbehaviour opportunities there are some nice slides and marine-themed equipment (and I did actually overhear pretentious parent pillocks tell little Jeremiah: "Why don't you go and utilise that other piece of equipment over there" It's a slide, God damn it, that's the technical term, and "equipment" is just a weasel word that means nothing, describes nothing and simply institutionalises bureaucratic vanilla-double-speak in infancy! Rant over!)

The next day it was early doors for Eloise. Lyra and I slumbagoed away whilst the others made their way to London for the epic day of a lifetime for the Ginger Peril with absolutely not a moment wasted as she was rushed from destination to destination from the Houses to Parliament to Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace to Somewhere Else and Somewhere Else Again and Maybe the Tower of London but not Platform 9¾. But a date with Charlie at his Chocolate Factory, or at least somebody's reinterpretation of it, figured prominently.