South Green, Billericay & Blean, Kent

Good King Hal playing "Spot the Next Queen" Competition. He won a years supply of prunes, two episodes of the Jeremy Kyle Show and a 1991 Vauxhall Senator with 156,782 miles on the clock. He complained to the judges and was sent to bed with slapped legs and no supper.

A lovely weekend with Amanda and James in Essex. My son is rapidly getting up to Olympic Standard on Mario Cart on the Wii console. We had some great fun with that. Monday morning dawned cold and bright and I was on my way with the short journey to Billericay and a return visit to South Green School. I started the day off with a fabulous faux pas. Signing in at the office there were two ladies in there, I chatted to them while signing in. They were making lots of suggestions about how the day should go, which I thought was a bit odd and really it should be up to the teachers to make the decisions, not a couple of ladies in the office. I told them this. They looked at me strangely and then told me slowly, as if explaining to an idiot, that they were the teachers. Ah. Sorry. Good start.

We had a fantastic day at this lovely lovely school. The children were fantastic - really enthusiastic and excitable, and the teachers were equally welcoming and charming. The quiz and the coat of arms were particularly good. After a delicious pasta lunch we had a brilliantly fun afternoon. Once again I gave the boys team a pep talk before their jousting final. And predictably it ended with the ladies once more walking off with the win. Current score after Billericay was:

GENTLEMEN 0 - 6 LADIES

Amazing. After leaving the school I headed on down over the Dartford crossing to my sister's house in Stockbury near Sittingbourne. We had a nice relaxing evening and it was good to see my brother-in-law Julian starting his new job after being made redundant a while back. In the morning I drove down the M2 and A2 to Blean, near Canterbury for my 6th visit to this wonderful school. As ever the entire group were done up in some brilliant Tudor costumes, there was laughs a plenty through the morning session. Another lovely lunch followed and we were then moved down to the main hall for the afternoon. There was a group of the young ladies who reckoned that the talk about Tudor crime and punishment was too much for them and held hands at the back of the hall with eyes sticking out like organ stops. They had managed to cope with bucket fulls of poo being chucked around in the morning, but not Tudor torture! They soon forgot their squeamishness when the jousting started and once more we seemed to have a brilliant ladies team, but somehow the gents finally managed to string some moves together and at last....the Gents won a tournament! This now makes the score:

GENTLEMEN 1 - 6 LADIES

Not quite so embarrassing as before. I was due to meet Sue Marsh et al from Skandia down in Southampton today, but it has had to be postponed due to heavy colds amongst some of the Skandia crew! So I drove back to Somerset today and tomorrow I am up at St Paul's School in Shepton Mallet again.