Two Breakthroughs

A stocky blonde policewoman is calling door to door. "I don't suppose you saw anything of the dog bite last week," she says.  I tell her I wasn't even here. Afterwards I congratulate myself on speaking to a police without coming over all of a tremble.

Ailz tells Dot we'll be going back to Kent a day early. She says that's fine and she realizes we have other things in our lives apart from her. That wasn't the expected outcome but isn't it grand?

Marbles

Khan's lad and another boy were playing with marbles on the street outside our front door. If you'd have asked me earlier I'd have said kids didn't play with marbles anymore.

When my kids were young we had an improvised game where two players shot marbles across no-man's land at one another's armies of little plastic wrestlers. Anyone remember those?  The wrestlers I mean. They were weird and amusing, bordering on the surreal. We used to give them names. There was a skinny little guy with an Arab head-dress whom we called Saddam. That tells you roughly when this was.

Khan's lad asked us if we'd got any marbles left over from those times. Had we said yes he'd have begged them off us. He's got an eye for the main chance, that kid.

Thank You, Wikipedia

PS. Those little plastic wrestlers: they're called kinkeshi. They were marketed in the US and UK as M.U.S.C.L.E.- which stands for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere. We used to have a bag of them. Perhaps we still do. Up in the loft most probably.