Saturday 14 November

Video of Aquarium at Charlie Chaplin, featuring Itchy and Scratchy.

It has rained hard and continually overnight, there are gales across Southern England and Wales. I imagine the playground is by now flooded, and that the various climbing frames and slides, and the wooden train and dolls house are completely underwater, like the toy castles put into fish tanks - the children at Charlie Chaplin now mermaids and mermen, swimming through the submerged playground.

A playworker arrives with two slices of granary bread in a plastic bag to toast for his breakfast.

I mention my thoughts about the underwater playground, a playworker says that would make a wonderful theme for an animated film, made by the children.

A small boy tells a member of staff

“You are the one who had a slug on your face!”

A girl walks out of the building holding a laminated map of the world. She says she is going to put the map in a puddle to drown all the bad people in the world. The good people are much taller than the bad people they also have larger feet) so they wont drown. She looks at the leaves in the puddles, and says they are bad people, and if you touch the leaves you get blood on your hands, because the bad people are vampires.

Having brought a tape measure to find out the dimensions of an area of wall, I measure the heights of the children:

Shooja – 5 feet, 4 inches

Nathan - 5 feet, 2 inches

Ryan – 5 feet, 2 inches

Charlie – 4 feet, 11 inches

Jermain – 4 feet, 8 inches

Tommy – 4 feet, 7 inches

Abubakar – 4 feet, 6 inches

Mohammed – 4 feet, 4 inches

Alex – 4 feet, 3 inches

Leah – 4 feet, 1 inch

Gary (sitting) – 4 feet

Crystal – 3 feet, 10 inches

Daniel – 3 feet, 7 inches

The playground is very damp and very wet, at various times the rain pours down so hard, that the shapes of the blocks of flats to one side of the playground are blurred grey.

When it is raining at its heaviest, various children leave the building to go out in the rain, obviously happy and all smiling broadly.

A boy sits writing a letter to his mum and dad asking them to each tick a box if they want a Christmas present, or another box if they do not want a present. He says he wants a telescope. He didn’t get one last year, so he might get it this year.

My hat (a secondhand one recently bought in Finland) is lifted from my head and smelt by a boy. “It smells like Pizza Hut!”