Homeward bound

Going home today. This is made easier by the fact that I have got Finn to come round at ten in the morning to get us out. I have told him to glower, especially at Shark, and to cross his arms and tap his foot. This should do the trick. I have warned that if he does not come round to shoo us out, then we may stay, possibly forever, since it is much easier to live in a cottage with no belongings than a house full of treasures as diverse as six broken computers and a life-size wombat with suspiciously believable fur.

And, I promised on the other side of the cottage door yesterday, we can visit Wroxeter on the way home. This will be fun. This will be brilliant. Wroxeter, I tell Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, is a big city abandoned by the Romans and not lived in since, so there is bound to be Roman treasure about and, who knows, it could be us that finds it.

A cross-looking foot-tapping man and the promise of illegal digging of some gravel in a field is a combination that is clearly too good to resist. Tiger, Shark and Squirrel pack up their belongings without resistance or argument and are sitting in the car ready to go by 10.17.

This is an excellent start, and I congratulate everyone before setting off. And when we get to Wroxeter I give myself a big kick in the shin because in winter Wroxeter is shut on Tuesdays.

So off we go to Ironbridge again with our newly acquired family pass to have an argument round the back of Abraham Darby's furnace and to drag our feet in the museum about the History of Iron. For added convenience the science exploration bit is shut until 2008.

And after that, there's nowhere to go on a freezing cold shut Tuesday but home. Where I discover I've left the heating on for the last three days. So at least it's nice and warm even though I've single-handedly managed to trash the environment in my absence.

A so-so day, I'd say.