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Tuesday 1st September 2015

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Phoebe saw the sea for the first time today. She didn’t seem that impressed. Fair enough. It’s just a load of dirty and brackish water. Sometimes you need to see things through the eyes of a child to understand how mundane they are. She goes fucking crazy over a tiny squeaking koala bear and again, you have to concede that is a lot more impressive than some sewage filled water. Spot on Junior. The world is shit.

Because I am more weary of the world I enjoyed sitting in a small garden shed on the promenade at Southward (apparently these things sell for approaching £150,000 which is surely insane - they don’t even have internet access). I played chess against a four year old and beat him easily and then played poker against an eight year old and managed to win 50p off him without any problem. Later I’d play them at cricket and find they were equally rubbish at that. What a joy to hit the ball all the way down the beach and force a child to run into the sea to get it. I haven’t played cricket for years and still I thrashed them.

We also went to the arcade, where I see they are trying to cash in on the success of the ITV show Tipping Point by setting up machines where you have to put in 2ps in the hope of dislodging more 2ps off moving shelves. I invested £1.40 in this scheme (glad that they had done away with the annoying trivia questions) but left with only about 30p (having finally made the cliff face fall) and an eraser, a big die and a sweet (which I ate despite the fact that it had almost integrated with its paper - it was mine, I had earned it and I was fucking well going to enjoy it). Someone somewhere is having a good laugh at us poor saps throwing away our 2ps and earning upwards of £3 a day. That’s on every single machine.

I used to love the arcades when I was a kid (I had the gambling bug then and still enjoy a flutter). One of my happiest childhood memories is finding a 1p one armed bandit that unbeknownst to the owners of the arcade had  developed a fault and you didn’t need to put 1p in to operate. Over the course of half an hour I slowly emptied the machine and walked out with my pockets bulging with maybe 150pence. My parents, usually fastidiously honest, remarkably allowed me to keep my bounty as they felt the arcade itself was running dishonestly, with machines that would make them hundreds of pence a day, so this was a victory for the punter. It would be years before I felt such Robin Hood style pleasure again, when me and my friends realised that the condom machine in the pub we went to (when we were 16ish) had a similar fault and if you jiggled the draw in the exact correct way you could get free packs of condoms and occasionally a few rejected pounds. If my mum every found my secret stash of three or four boxes of condoms she would have thought I was some kind of teenage lothario. But I had no proper use for those condoms for another three or four years, by which time I had either blown them up like balloons, filled them with water or had the occasional posh wank (the one time that I would ever think that wearing a condom would make sexual activity more enjoyable - I was wrong of course).

I beat the 8 year old kid four times at air hockey, but I had paid for the games so it was only fair. Then my wife took me on, trying to teach me a lesson, and scored the first goal, giving me a fright, but I won the game 6-1 because I am the best. I told the kid that I was a semi-professional air hockey player, making £100,000 a year playing the game throughout the summer, so he’d done well to even score a few goals against me. Plus he’d told me that he never let younger kids win a game of anything, even if it was their first go, you have to always try your hardest. I agree with him. And if he’s lucky he will grow up to be a well-balanced adult like me. And a teenager with a secret drawer of condoms that will never be used for their intended function.



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