Saturday 2 August 2014

Magnetic hippo

Some years ago – at least eight and possibly more – DivingDaughter sent a little wooden hippo fridge magnet to her little sister, Toadlet, and described a game we could play with it.


The game is a little bit like hide and seek except that you don't hide the hippo exactly but just attach it, not necessarily very obviously, to something metal. When someone other than the hider finds the hippo they detach it and re-attach it somewhere else. In short, you can move the hippo if you didn't put it in its current place. You don't say anything.

The hippo has been lost for years. Today I found it in the cellar!

DivingDaughter had gone down into the cellar to find something she stores there and my elder grandson, who is four, went with her. He wasn't satisfied until everyone else in the house had been down there too and kept sending up this message with whoever had just been down and decided to resurface: "If anyone else wants to come down into the cellar, now's their chance."

So I went down the ladder. On my infrequent visits to the cellar I look around to see what decluttering I can do and remove empty boxes and things we no longer want but which someone else might find useful.

Elder grandson and his family set off on their journey back to Derbyshire this afternoon with some coat and hat hooks for their new house, an electric pump for airbeds, paddling pools and the like, and three bottles of homemade apple wine made in three different batches nine or ten years ago. I guess they could make a sausage casserole with some of it if it's not very gluggable. My best wines were generic reds made with mixtures of fruits such as elderberries, blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, sloes, rhubarb. We glugged those pretty fast. The apple wines were less successful so they were put in the cellar and forgotten about to mature.

I also found Magnetic Hippo in the box containing the no longer used coats hooks. That was nice as I'd supposed he had slid down the back of a radiator or somehow else got lost forever on his wanderings.

Magnetic Hippo game restarted today.

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