Somerford Junior, Christchurch

It was a fairly early start for me today as I was heading down to Somerford Junior School in Christchurch, and I well remembered from my previous visits to this town what a bottleneck of a place it is to get through. I left home at about 6.20am and all went swimmingly until about the last 5-10 miles. Gridlock was not far off it. Eventually the journey took me just over 2 hours - and it was only about 55 miles.

The teachers and the rest of the staff at this lovely school were as welcoming and fun as ever and it was great to see them all again. There was much merriment from the ladies on the front reception desk about my t-shirt I was wearing today. It says "Body of a God - shame it's Buddha" which they all thought was wonderful and wanted copies of it for their own other halves. They also reminded me that on my last visit to this school I left my mobile phone there - I made sure I had it close to hand all day today.

It was a year three class today and some of them struggled a bit as they have not been doing the Tudors for very long, but they perked up as the day went on. It was almost over poweringly hot today and I was not exactly dressed for it in all my furs and layers!

After a lovely pasta lunch it was on to the crimes and punishments section, a fun stocks event and then the jousting. One of the ladies teams in the first leg were a little...er...unfortunate(?) and were never really in the running as their lead off lady took nearly 10 minutes to hook all of her quoits! Even when I helped her cheat by loading all bar one of the quoits onto her lance, she managed to knock them all off again within a couple of seconds! However, despite this, the other ladies team marched on through to the final where they comprehensively thrashed the gents champions!

My drive home was equally fraught just getting out of Christchurch! Another two hours before home again. Tomorrow I am much more local, with a return visit for the first time in two years to Martock School in, unsurprisingly, Martock! Should be fun.