Bambi on the shelf

"Shelves," Best Beloved has been saying ever since we learnt we would one day be living under the same roof. And, "Cupboards." And, "Shelves and cupboards."

"Can I get you a cup of cupboard? Would you like some shelf with that?"

Yesterday it changed to: "I get the impression you weren't expecting this many boxes."

You live and learn. My new family's furniture moved in over the weekend. An interesting experience. Why does dimensional transcendentalism only belong to the Time Lords? Couldn’t they at least license it out? I would even put up with the circles set into the walls. You could put things in them. Still, by the end of yesterday I could reach the sink and wash up breakfast, which was more than I could do that morning. Progress is being made. Also, there's plenty of walls where shelves and cupboards can go, the ceilings are practically unused apart from the lights, and we can always take up our freshly installed carpets and put some trapdoors in (though the flat downstairs may object).

So, worldly goods take up volume – that's one fact of life learnt from the last 48 hours. Another is that even if you take two technically identical go-carts, and their drivers both put pedal to the metal, and one driver is a 10-stone teenager and the other is Ben, then the go-cart with the 10-stone teenager will accelerate faster. I'm a pretty good driver; I also know about keeping close to the curves, steering into the skid and all that. So I can block – but let the little buggers past you and you eat their rubber for the rest of the session.

I don't know why go-carting is fun but it is. You go at a pace that would be maddeningly leisurely in a normal car, but it feels like the speed of sound. Your wrists ache like hell after a few minutes as you constantly hold the cart into its turn when it would really rather be Newtonian and keep going straight on. And let's not even think of the environmental implications. Maybe that's why a session costs £21. Carbon tax.

I had my stag do a few weeks ago but that was for grown-ups. I'm also a youth group leader and I consider it my duty to introduce young minds to as many concepts as I can that are legal, moral and age appropriate. So I thought I would have a youth stag do as well. Hence the go-carting at Oxford Stadium (a picture may follow) followed by dinner at Pizza Express. The party after us was a group of about 10 teen girls, just to show that it's not all testosterone and Y-chromosomes. Possibly a youth hen party?

Pizza Express introduced the lads to a real grown-up hen party, though, hosted by the Abingdon Mutton-Dressed-As-Lamb convention. 1920s flappers only really looked good in the 1920s and even then you had to have the figure for it, and I bet very few 1920s flappers had tattoos – at least, not like this lot. But the one whose dress was made of reflective yellow high-vis material certainly made a lasting impression, if only on the retinas.

We tried to think of an official term for youth stag. The only youthful stag we could think of was Bambi, but if I say I took a group of teenagers to a Bambi party, or refer to them as "my Bambis", I could well have strange looks cast at me and be stripped of my CRB-cleared status. So I think I'll end here.