Free Comic book day

Jay has spent a lot of the holiday reading comics. I couldn't quantify the split between reading and just looking at the pics, but they have served him well as in-car entertainment, bribes for good behaviour and he does seem to be getting into reading as a way of having fun. His and my choice of mainly Simpsons comics may not be nurturing the finest vocabulary possible, but the sooner he can read Theo a bedtime story, the better.

So the prospect of Free Comic Book Day at the Onehunga comic store has been eagerly anticipated for a couple of weeks. 2 free comics for walking in, 2 free comics for a donation to the local school, and 2 free comics for wearing a super-hero outfit. Our lack of super-hero outfits got us 4 free comics each. That's 12 as we didn't claim any for Theo. We were expecting the shop to be offloading their lost product onto us, and to be spending the week reading copies of Millennium Bug vs Pager Boy, but actually they were giving away special editions of all the latest comics that were distributed across the world on what I discovered is a universal event aimed at combating illiteracy (and selling comics).

Not to be out done, the supermarket had free-knife day on the preceding day. This could feature in the 'things they don't do in Stokey' blog, and had less noble motives than combating stupidness. There was no requirement to dress up. You simply had to listen to a sales pitch about some larger knives and you got a free small knife. The small print was that you had to be over 21 so Jay and Theo did not get tooled up.