Two months back, I bought some ice pops for the first time in a long time. The plastic packaging was different from the bite-and-rend cheek-slicing tube of my youth, but the glorious poison-frog colour scheme was just as I remembered. It was the summer holidays, so you couldn’t not notice the sheer lovely unnerving unordered joy of kids in the wild, and also I was remembering my own childhood, how the things you did with your friends were a secret world and you’d be wary of the potential intrusion of adults and authority. Remembering too how there was more blood than it is deemed seemly to remember, what with various injuries, baby teeth dropping like flies etc.

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This all sort of percolated without me noticing, and then sometime in early August I think I saw a tweet about this competition, and it bubbled up into a story.

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p.s. I don’t swear in front of the kids