It's the Famous Five on a picnic!


Amelie's drinking lashings of ginger beer. It's no wonder she kept throwing up on the rug.

But that aside, what do you call a woman with a seagull on her head?

Cliff.

Well, she's in the shadows and on a summer holiday. Unfortunately she looks more like Roy Orbison to me.

But anyhoo, Lisa and I invited our friends S & A around for Sunday lunch yesterday. We actually extended the invitation a couple of weeks ago, after which I had second thoughts about the baby food stains on the carpet, the clutter of toys in the living room, and the lingering odour of vomit (I really should talk to Lisa about that), and promptly decided to take them out for a picnic. At which point it started raining.

But as luck would have it, the clouds broke for a few hours yesterday, so Lisa spent the morning applying fake tan to her legs, then put on a pair of jeans, and we headed off to Queen's Park with a couple of rugs and a supermarket trolley's worth of food. Having wandered around for a few minutes looking for a shady spot where we weren't likely to be hit by a cricket ball, 'A' trod in some dog poo, and we decided to head for the canine-free zone on the other side of the park.

We ended up on a slope under a tree, eating sandwiches and sausage rolls, while Amelie attempted a roll of her own. I don't know if she was deliberately trying to re-enact a nursery rhyme, but whilst crawling up the hill to fetch a pail of water, she lost her balance and went tumbling down the slope. Unfortunately she only completed a couple of rolls before our guests saved her, which was a bit of a shame. I haven't seen anything so funny in ages. I'd have been happy for her to roll all the way to the bottom. At least it would have given me time to get my camera out.

Anyhoo, we had a very nice afternoon catching up on all our news. I'm now fully up to speed with the latest developments in the hospital pharmacy department. Apparently only the other day, my old manager asked 'S' if he'd seen me recently, which was very touching. Unfortunately he didn't want to know how I am or how the job's going, he was just after my views on Big Brother. He's obviously missing the important conversations we had last summer.

But ultimately, when you're out for the day with another couple, there's really only one activity you should be trying. So having polished off the apple crumble and home-made cookies supplied by our guests, we indulged in a bit of swinging...

Unfortunately Amelie was more interested in gnawing her way through the safety bar at the front, leaving black rubber marks all over her face. As Lisa puts it, about one minute into the video, "She looks like she's been up the chimney".