Today I'm going to talk about the rest of my day out in Bradford. I tried to do that a couple of days ago but got very sidetracked by those Snowdogs. Today I'm determined to say what I meant to say then.
It's a strange day today. Winefride and I have accompanied my person to go and see my creator. But my creator is a very busy person and today we've got to not be with her and we're not even allowed to be in her house for various strange insurance and health and safety reasons. So we've come out into the centre of Manchester in search of somewhere quiet. And we've succeeded too.
Winefride and I have come to Manchester Central Library and we've come upstairs to a very large room. It's a circle room and in the ceiling is a big circular glass window. Around the outside are lots and lots of old magazines and journals in bound volumes. To the right of our seat we can see shelves containing Policy Studies which doesn't sound very interesting and Political Quarterly which might be very dull indeed depending on who wrote all of the volumes. We can also see three whole shelves of books that are called Poetry. That sounds more interesting to me.
I think my person should read more poetry. She bought a wonderful anthology recently and I've been reading some of it out loud when she's been somewhere else. The words sound really good when I say them. I'm trying to encourage my person to read that book because it is amazing. My person has some other books of poems too. Some are old and long poems by people with names like Dante. Some are newer and include the poems of Maya Angelou and Audré Lorde. Has she read them? No she hasn't. And I think she should get on with it. My person has lots of books that she hasn't read and if she didn't buy any more and just read the ones she has already got then she would still be reading them by next week. Not only that. She still wouldn't have finished by next decade. But she keeps buying more books anyway. Two books she bought in the last week are in her bag even though she hadn't finished the previous books in her bag. My person can be very strange.
So here are the three of us, Winefride, my person and myself, sitting i the quiet of the Wolfson reading room in Manchester. It's very nice indeed. I hope nobody is too perturbed by the sound of the laptop keys as my person types the words I say. I like my person. She types my blog for me and even carries on typing when I say embarrassing things about her. Maybe that's very strange too.
We had a good day in Bradford. After meeting Pikachu we had a walk round the city. Nearly half the city seemed to be uphill. And nearly half seemed to be downhill. There wasn't a lot of flat. But there was one flat piece and we liked that a lot. It had lots of water fountains and my person played in them as much as she could. She had to protect Winefride and me because otherwise we would have got very wet and would still have been soaking at the end of the day.
The best thing in the fountains was a tunnel. Water jetted out of the ground on one side and formed an arch before falling back on the other side. And so it formed a tunnel with the sides and roof being flowing water. It was amazing. We all screeched with laughter and joy and we walked through it lots of times and people stared at us all for having so much fun.
By the end of the day it was even better. The sun had gone down and so it was dark. And in the darkness there were lots of lights in the fountains and they were very beautiful to look at. The best thing was that my person had a balloon from lunchtime and she placed that directly over one of the lit up fountains and the lights underneath the balloon kept changing colour. The entire balloon became a marvellous light show. It was spectacular. Here's that tunnel. We loved it.
Later we went for lunch and by that time we had been joined by my creator too. Table for four please. But they were mean in the restaurant and they wouldn't give us a table for four even though there were four of us. They seemed to think that their table system only applied to human customers not soft toy customers. That wasn't fair. Don't we count as people?
But we had to put up with this sorry situation and we all enjoyed eating our pizza and our salad. Afterwards my creator helped me to do some colouring in from the children's menu and we used the special crayons with the pizza name on them. Winefride didn't do any colouring in but she did do a drawing of herself. My sister is amazing. I didn't know that she was so good at using crayons or that she could draw herself. I think we will have to let her use paper and crayons again and see what she can create.
You can see my colouring here and you can see that Winefride's picture is there. She even drew her reins and then tied herself to that person's beak. Sorry the paper is a bit crumpled. That's my person's fault. She put our work into her bag and wasn't careful enough with it.
But then Winefride started to get a bit bored. That's okay. She decided that it would be much more fun to try eating the crayons than to draw with them. I'm not sure about the taste of crayons but they're not poisonous so she wasn't in any danger. Yesterday evening we heard about an autistic boy who liked chewing Blu-Tack. My person said that when she heard that the taste of Blu-Tack came to her very, very strongly. But who hasn't ever chewed on Blu-Tack? Me and Winefride, that's who. Here's a picture of us. I was still busy colouring. I stopped for the photo which is why it looks like my blue crayon is colouring in orange. Winefride was away in a world of her own with her crayons. I think she was only sucking on them not chewing on them. She certainly seemed to enjoy it.
And then the four of us went for a walk in Bradford, looking for charity shops. There was a very special shop where the books didn't cost anything at all. In other shops my person bought things and then she did a totally silly thing and left all her purchases in a cafe before we went home. She can be very silly and forgetful sometimes. All day long she was carrying some special sweets to share with my creator. She forgot about them too. And you wouldn't believe how often she forgets things at home because she's got so completely focused on something else. It happens all the time and fortunately most of the time she can laugh at herself and fortunately she hasn't done anything so silly that the house has burned to the ground or been burgled.
Sometimes making a cup of tea and drinking it can take hours because there are so many stages at which the process can be completely forgotten. She can forget to switch the kettle on, forget to close the kettle lid, forget that she's switched the kettle on, forget that she's poured water on a tea bag, and even after the tea is made she can forget it exists. She's silly. And if she is meant to do something in addition to tea making there's a high chance it won't happen. My person is silly. I think it's probably part of her being autistic and so getting hyper-focused on things to the exclusion of everything else. I think so.
We went into a Chinese supermarket. It had a little cafe and some of the cake was reduced to a cheap price so we all share some Chinese cakes. They also sold buns a bit like the ones in the bun shop in Newcastle. The cakes were delicious. Then we walked round the supermarket. Everything was pretty normal until I heard a voice.
"Hello pink thing."
I looked around and I couldn't see anyone. I guessed the voice was talking to me because I am pink. But I couldn't see anyone. Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe it was the voice of God and he would send me on a mission to take lots of awesomeness to the world. Then it spoke again.
"Hello pink thing, who are you? I'm down here on the shelf."
I looked down and saw, to my surprise, that a piece of fruit was speaking to me. That's not something that I've ever experienced before. I climbed down from my person's shoulder where I had been sitting and onto the shelf to talk to the piece of fruit.
We had a long conversation about what it's like to be a very fortunate and adventurous blob soft toy and what it's like to be a piece of fruit. I felt a bit sorry for the piece of fruit because it's fate was to be bought by someone and then eaten. Or not bought and then thrown away. Whereas my fate is to keep having lots of adventures.
Before parting we had a big hug. It seemed to be a nice piece of fruit. I hope this picture will be in my blog. It's not showing on my screen.
Well I was glad to get away and glad afterwards when we went to that cafe where my person forgot her purchases. She did well. She didn't melt about it and just accepted that all the things were lost. She probably wouldn't have read the book anyway. It would have joined all the other unread books.
So that's about it for Bradford. We had a long journey home and only the first train was full of very drunk football fans. And that one wasn't a very long journey. We got home very tired and Winefride and I were soon fast asleep dreaming about all the things we might get up to the next day. Would it be a home day? Would I be able to read more of that poetry book and would Winefride do some drawing? Or would we be taken out on another big adventure. A Sunday kind of adventure. It turned out that we would have both. We spent the morning at home. And then in the afternoon we went to a cinema and then got lost on the Metro. Because my person was silly. Again. She got on the wrong train. Forgot it was the wrong train. And forgot to get off it where she needed to. My person can be very silly.
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