The Day

Today was the day. Or rather, The Day.

Or, to be even more specific, Aviator's day.

It was the middle of lunch, and Giuseppe and I had just entered the grass area where a good part of my year group invariably spend their free time. Aviator was standing in the centre of the lawn, holding a banana peel and looking at us solemnly. He said 'Today's the day, I can feel it. Watch this.'

This seemed to mean something to Giuseppe, as she immediately stopped to watch; I did the same thing, although at this point I had no idea what he was on about. Aviator turned and threw the banana peel towards the bin (and luckily not in the direction we were in), which, as we estimated later, was a good twelve metres at the very least. The peel arced gently across the lawn, bounced off a wall, and landed exactly in the bin.

Aviator promptly turned around, hi-fived Giuseppe, and cheered 'Today was the day! It's the day! At last!'

I was still confused. Luckily, Giuseppe took a moment to fill me in.

According to Giuseppe, virtually every day, for the past year, Aviator has valiantly attempted to get his rubbish in the bin from at least ten metres away (I'm not sure why. It can't be laziness, as after he's thrown it he has to go and pick the rubbish up from wherever it's fallen to throw it away properly). And every day, for the past year, he's missed.

'You can tell this is a big deal,' Giuseppe added when all this had been duly explained. 'That's only the third time I've hi-fived Aviator in my life. The first time was by accident. The second was when I made that call about how Aviators have never gone out of fashion at your Doctor Who competition.'

She and Aviator then discussed the awesomeness of Aviators (as in, the glasses) for some minutes, so I'll resume the conversation after that happened.

'You should write about this on your blog,' enthused Aviator. 'I think I'm making a bad impression. Last time you represented me as a pervert who has a thing for Doctor Who actresses.'

'That's what you are,' Giuseppe pointed out.

'What's wrong with some more flattering descriptions?' he replied indignantly. 'What about "Aviator, with his sense of style and rugged good looks . . ."'

Giuseppe and I both assured him that there was no way that description of him would make it on to the blog (in Giuseppe's case, quite forcefully). 'All the same, though,' said Giuseppe after we'd finished, 'I think you should write about it. We should give this day a name.'

'Really? I thought it was just "The Day",' I said doubtfully. 'Anyway, I don't think I'm going to write about it.'

Look how that turned out. Anyway, back to today.

'I like "The Day",' Giuseppe agreed.

'It's The Day. Nothing can go wrong today,' said Aviator happily, going off to boast of his astonishing feat to the others.

And so, here we are with 'The Day'. It's not only Aviator, in fact. It's become quite a sport recently to throw things in the bin from a distance away, but with a different conclusion. It's called 'Pants-off'. You shout somebody's name, throw something in the bin, and if you get it in, they have to take their pants off. It's not complicated. And, speaking as someone who has now seen Aviator, Lox and Cuttlefish remove their trousers on separate occasions, it's honestly not that pleasant, either. It's actually extremely unpleasant. Even dwelling on it is causing painful flashbacks ('The pastiness! My God, the pastiness!') so I'm going to stop now.

The fact that everyone is throwing things doesn't excuse Aviator from doing bizarre things. As with all my friends, he is still a Stranger Thing. On Friday I happened to be walking past him when he stopped, shoved a piece of folded paper into my hand, muttered 'I have completed my task. The prophecy is complete,' and took off. When I unfolded it I found a picture of a wheelchair. It was, in fact, this picture, although the one he gave me was in black and white and was far more pixellated.

I had to wait until this morning to ask about it. Even then, he refused to say anything beyond 'The prophecy is complete. It is now your responsibility.' Personally, I'm convinced he's doing it purely to annoy the hell out of me. I could be wrong, though. If we wake up tomorrow to discover that the whole world is slowly and painfully burning up, then it may possibly be due to the fact that I didn't pass the picture on to the person it was intended for. Either that, or global warming is progressing WAY faster than previously expected.

Anyway, the point is that I wasn't entirely ready to believe Aviator when he said 'This is an auspicious day. Everything after this moment is going to go perfectly.' Although, to be honest, I could do with an auspicious day. My own weekend was particularly inauspicious in parts.

I was recruited - even I'm not totally sure how - to help with the 'pre-loved clothing' stall at the school fete they were having at my primary school. Don't get me started on 'pre-loved' clothing. What's wrong with 'second-hand'? Is it just a marketing technique? Do these fete-runners think we're more likely to buy 'pre-loved' than 'second-hand'? If so, I'm not sure it's working. I personally am relatively happy to purchase clothing which I know has been previously owned. I'm not so sure about clothes that have been 'loved'. What does loving entail? It may be something perfectly innocent, like that the previous owner wore the item of clothing every day of their life until they regretfully decided to pass it on. Or possibly died (maybe even while they were wearing the item of clothing), and then had it passed on for them. Makes you want to go right out and buy it, doesn't it?

Not that anyone would have wanted to buy this stuff, as most of it was memorabilia from the late seventies and early eighties. Velvet sparkly shirts, retro flower prints, a weird kind of faux-leopard skin jacket I saw three people try on, but which nobody bought. You could tell that all the parents of the little kids had just gone through their wardrobes, gone 'Well, I haven't worn this since I was in my twenties, you never know, maybe it's cool again - I'll give it to the clothing stall.' Which, apart from anything else, doesn't exactly fit as 'loved clothing'. I appreciate I'm not an expert in these things. A casual remark in my third-ever post about 'Aviators supposedly coming back into fashion' prompted a debate that is enduring even now. But surely, I thought, no one would want to buy a black velvet singlet with a huge number of diamantes glued to it, as well as the numerous glue spots where the diamantes had fallen off?

I was wrong, actually, the singlet was one of the first things to go. But I believe the general theory was sound. The problem was with the customers.

Oh, yes, and something else about the 'pre-loved' clothing stall that weirded me out a little (or a lot, if I'm going to be honest): the underwear. Yes, previously 'loved' underwear. Sound tempting? No? Why not?

Luckily there was a second-hand (NOT pre-loved) book stall right next to it, as well as a white elephant stall on the other side, so I spent as much time as possible escaping from the hand-knitted belts and ski jackets and in those stalls instead. The book stall was especially good. I bought the Chaser Annual from 2007 for $2. It was in extremely good condition, and I was convinced I'd got an awesome deal until Aviator told me about what his older brother had managed to do at the stall, later in the day. Apparently he'd just brought a shopping trolley along with him and filled it with all the leather-bound textbooks he could find. They charged him $1. He paid them $10 (clearly Aviator's brother has a greater social conscience than Aviator does) and filled up his bookshelves in the hope that it looked impressive. Then again, this story is from 'Yes, Leslie, my grandad is the Grand-High-Freemason of Australia' Aviator, and therefore cannot be relied upon.

On the other side of the clothing stall, as I've previously mentioned, was a white elephant stall. The high point of my day was when an eight- or nine-year-old girl, having had several Barbies (as well as one Ken) pointed out to her by a woman who was presumably her mother, went 'Let me get this straight - there's four of the girls, and one guy? That's a bit dodgy, isn't it?'

The lowest point of the day was probably watching my dad, brother and uncle playing in a band. My dad was the guitarist. My brother (Drummer Boy) was the back-up drummer. My uncle was extremely noticeable insofar as he was wearing a bright pink-and-aqua Hawaiian shirt I could have sworn he'd bought from the pre-loved clothing stall. Also, he was playing a banjo. An extremely stylish man, my uncle. Luckily there were about eight people in the band altogether (they were playing mostly Irish folk tunes), and much of the crowd's attention was being given to the ten-year-old accordion player, so I was saved from any major embarrassment.

So, given that my weekend, if interesting, was not overly enjoyable, I think it's about time I got something back. I know it's nearly the end of today, which wasn't that amazing either. The most interesting thing (apart from The Exciting Adventures of Aviator and his Rubbish-Throwing Abilities) was watching Mr W's novel way of dealing with students who yell outside his classroom when he's trying to teach. It consists of going outside, yelling at the student in question (in this case, it was a student called - well, not actually called, but this is what I'm going to call him - Arch), and then dragging said student back into the classroom and introducing him to the crowd of Year Eights. It worked extremely efficiently. I for one am never going to yell outside Mr W's classroom. Or wolfwhistle at Mr W, which is what Aviator nearly did once (a few weeks ago, Marie-Clare, Giuseppe and I had persuaded Aviator to wolfwhistle at the next person who came around the corner. It turned out to be Mr W. It's probably lucky Aviator managed to stop himself in time, as that could have gotten extremely awkward). Anyway, I think I'm about due for something amazing to happen. Like the news that The Beatles have somehow regained their youth and have decided to do a concert here. Or that Strictly Speaking will be back on TV (THEY AXED ANDREW HANSEN'S SHOW! THEY AXED IT! Well, they say they're 'moving it to another time slot, on a different channel', but it's been AXED. That's it. Here's a gratuitous clip of Andrew Hansen doing his stuff, just to keep us all sane).

Anyway, as I was saying, it's unlikely that two of The Beatles are going to come back to life, or that Andrew Hansen is going to turn up outside my door holding chocolates in one hand and the complete Series 5 of Doctor Who in the other (which would be nice - although just Andrew Hansen, without the chocolates or DVDs, would be fine by me). Still, there's a couple of hours left, and I can always hope.

After all, today's the day.