Ten Things I've learnt This Summer:

It's been a long summer, and while a little of what's happened has involved me learning things which are, comparatively, Serious Business, I felt that this little list would sum up what the summer's really been like.

1. If I go somewhere else, and leave my tent with my friends, and get back to find my tent has mysteriously rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, my friends didn't move it: tents just get up and move like that, honestly.
2. You only need a cape, a paper crown, and a toy sword to become a convincing King. Even passers by will be impressed and reverent in the face of your majesty.
3. The reason Batman is so lonely and violent is because no one will hug Batman. The reason no one will hug Batman is because Batman wears a cape. Hugging capes is awkward: do your put your hands outside the cape, and thus have a much wider radius for your arms to cover due to dramatic billowyness, or put your arms under the cave and invade Batman's personal space? Superheroes are hard to hug.
4. Speaking of which, a man dressed as Batman preaching about God is hard to take seriously.
5. Celery is a difficult fashion accessory to manage, and not many people can pull it off: a decorative vegetable isn't for everyone. Don't wear celery.
6. Any story, if dramatic enough, can be adapted to the form of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air opening theme song.
7. I can imagine no bad day that cannot be improved by three or four people coming together to play "Yellow Submarine" on their instrument of choice.
8. Sandwich making among teenage males is somewhere between an art form and a competitive sport: making an incredibly tall sandwich with a ridiculous variety of flavours then crushing it down as far as it can go is an immensely manly pursuit.
9. There is always one person in a card game who takes it ridiculously seriously, one person who is astonishingly good, and one person who always loses. I will always be the last of those people.
10. People seem remarkably happy to lend me a cuddly lion at short notice.

Bonus eleventh thing: my good friend Mozzy, who I met in the far off lands of The Internet, has started a wonderful blog that is one man's story of his trials and tribulations in the Zombie Apocalypse. Regular readers may see why this appeals to me. I'm on hand as a sort of editor/zombie/story consultant, while not actually writing posts for it.

Anyway, go check it out here. It's pretty cool.

Sometimes, I love my life.

Today, I achieved... well, not an ambition. You plan an ambition. I didn't know this was something I wanted to do until just after I did it.

Picture the scene. A quiet, small town corner shop, fairly newly open. It's eight o clock in the morning in the school holidays. There is no one else around as the owner contemplates taking tomatoes from the fresh fruit section and juggling them, something he's always wanted to do. When, suddenly, a mighty clatter arises as the door is slammed open, by the interpid passer by.

(I was not, sadly, wearing a cape at this point. To aid in the drama, imagine I was.)

The man has a wild look in his eyes. He has not shaved for several days, and looks as if he hasn't slept for them either. In one hand, he brandishes a cucumber from your own vegetable rack. He walks up to the counter with a purposeful gait, cloak that he isn't wearing billowing dramatically around his body from the draft from the door.

"This cucumber. Quickly."

His voice is gravelly and hoarse, like he's been gargling with gravel. Like he's a desperate man trying to be Don LaFontaine. Like he's a man who, at eight am on a Monday morning, knows he needs to buy a cucumber in a hurry and thinks he might as well make it cool.

He pays in cash. He thanks the man profusely, drops the cash into the charity box because he has no time to put it back in his wallet, and leaves the shop at speed, the cucumber held in the air.

I swear I bought this cucumber for a good reason. And not a sexual one, either;

And one day, I may tell you good people what that very good reason was.

Holidays, Camping, and My Evil Family - two blog posts in one

So, I just got back from holiday, and I'm off again tomorrow to go camping with a few thousand of my friends in a great big field. So it's no surprise that this post's going to include a few sun soaked anecdotes and theorising - and to make up for the absences, it's essentially a DOUBLE PLUS GOOD blog post today. Ie, it's longer.

I'm not actually going to talk about the holiday I just went on. Not because it was boring, but because if I start blogging about what actually happened recently in a relatively normal way, that's one step away from blogging about my feelings and how no one understands me and starting to talk about my muse. I might even start painting watercolours, writing serious poetry and using the phrase "my heart bleeds" non ironically.

So instead I'll tell you about how my aunt assassinated a world leader.

Everything you are about to read is true, and is reconstructed from my interviews with a key witness - known to me as "Mum".

In one Summer, my mother and her family were visiting some Mediterranean country - I can't remember which. One of those places which is deeply Catholic, and where all the women are either devastatingly beautiful or old and toothless and wearing black, with no middle ground. One of those places where outside every beautifully scenic village is a log with four old men sitting on it. One of those countries.

They arrived on a Saturday night. Now, one of the things peculiar to this area of the world is that not only, because of the Catholicness of it all, is everything closed on a Sunday, but everything's always closed on a Monday too. I've no idea why. But all this left my Aunt rather exasperated.

"We can't buy any food now, it's far too late," said she, "and we obviously can't buy any tomorrow, it's Sunday. Nowhere's ever open on a Monday, and I bet on Tuesday, that the... that the pope will die and we won't be able to get anything then!"

Guess what happened on Tuesday?

My Aunt, a lovely woman, killed the pope. I don't know how. Maybe she's a witch. But she's responsible for the death of the leader of the Catholic Church.

I am never, ever, getting on the wrong side of my aunt ever again.

As for the camping, I'm sure it'll all go great. Sure, my tent is large and complicated and I've never gone camping before, but, well, what could possibly go wrong? Just because I don't know the terminology...

Friend: Have you checked the tents this morning?

Me: Yeah, they're rocking up in a pretty tentlike fashion. Come on, let's do camping people things!

Friend: No, I mean... the tents, is everything tense?

Me: You're asking me if the tents are tents?
Friend: Yes, I'm asking you if the tents are tense.

Me: Seriously?

Friend: Well of course!
Me: Well, what do you expect them to be?
Friend: Not tense, if we're not careful.

Me: What, you're expecting them to turn into hyenas or postage stamps and just wander off?

Friend: What the hell are you talking about?

Me: Well, how would they become not tents all of a sudden?

Friend: Don't you know anything? Tents don't stay tense all the time if you leave them up.

Me: Everything I thought I knew about the universe is shaken and changing.

Nope. I see no problems at all...