This was the weekend of the messy party part 1, but with bonus excitement and fun beforehand. The fun was a trip to the school fair of the primary school round the corner, where some friends of J and K go. We only caught the last half an hour, and I had limited cash on me. But we came fourth in the challenge to build a tall self-supporting structure out of marshmallows and (uncooked) spaghetti. It’s surprisingly hard because most structures were too wobbly. J finally settled on the idea of lots of triangle-based pyramids with stuff on top. And the very nice man running the inflatable assault course and slide thing let them have an extra go round each, so the last of money spent on that paid for more fun than I was expecting.
There was a bit of getting the house straight, then more this morning. While I was washing up I heard a very loud bang from in front of the house and a Renault Clio drove past on the pavement and then stopped. I went out and the people living in the houses opposite were all out of their houses, no other cars around, and it turned out that the car had come off the road, banged into the first house, scraped across it and the next two houses and then stopped. On the way it cracked a front door step, knocked out a section of plastic drain pipe and cut two plastic gas pipes. The driver has a few scratches, very much in shock, but otherwise OK. Gas and emergency services were phoned – the gas people said we shouldn’t attempt to block up the pipes, even though they were making ominous gas-rushing-out noises.
The driver got taken in by one family, we got passers-by to cross onto the other side and made sure no-one was smoking. The police arrived and we started turning cars away. The fire brigade arrived and coned off the road, milled around for a bit, then finally put some temporary bunging stuff on the pipes. The gas people arrived in a van, which even though it had orange lights on the top couldn’t compete with any of the fire engines or police cars, although was probably better than the fire incident commander’s car. The gas bloke had a bent coat hanger looking thing to sniff out gas, and went into the houses and apparently checked the drains (because gas is heavier than air it could sink down through drains and grates and risk a later explosion). Altogether there were 3 fire engines, 4 police cars and a police van and 3 gas vans at one point or another.
Fortunately that was all sorted in less than an hour, because we were all asked to leave our houses, and we could get back in and finish off getting ready. Guests arrived in shifts, and the first shift managed to turn the stuff-out-in-paddling-pools phase into a full-on messy fight before the second shift arrived! There was the normal sand pit with fresh sand, a paddling pool of green cornflour and water, a paddling pool of cornflakes, a paddling pool of whipped up soap and water, a paddling pool of pink cooked spaghetti, and a paddling pool of silly string and shaving foam.
We did jam doughnuts hanging on strings, eaten hands-free and blindfolded, and then those who wanted cleared off to the field at the back of our house for the promised water fight. The arms race was definitely won by the other J’s water surface-to-air missile launcher, which had a fantastic capacity but needed pumping up fairly often.
Nice food and chatting, quieter playing indoors, and occasional changing into clean and dry clothes, warming up and so on for the combatants. The garden looks like a disaster zone, but much fun was had. We might be cleared up in time for the next go! Photos on Flickr soon.
