Answers on a (virtual) postcard, please!

We live quite close to a suburban university campus, and there is a lane that links the campus to the boys' school. This is most convenient as it allows school pick-ups to happen in the university car park rather than engendering traffic chaos on the dual carriageway that fronts the school. Sometimes one of my boys will come out at the usual time with the other not expected for another hour because of some after-school activity, mostly GCSE revision sessions for Sun 1 these days.

All this to explain why, now and again, I find myself in the campus café, slumped over an enormous cardboard cup of tea listening with attempted enthusiasm to endless tales of schoolboy misadventures. For an hour.

The café is suitably named Einstein and it has exactly this sticker on the wall facing the sofa where I found myself slumped last week. Jo and I looked for it when we got home. He did think it ironic that such a statement on creativity should be displayed in such an utterly empty picture. I was just pleased that he could use a word like ironic...

But the question is: was Einstein right? Far be it from me to consider questioning his scientific genius. No, no, no. I can't even use a word like quantum. I just thought about this quote all the way home, and it still wafts about in the often utterly empty space that is my head. Surely this quote stands on lots and lots of assumptions that we might not actually accept:

Do you have to be intelligent to be creative? And what is intelligence anyway? Can we not all have light-bulb moments, regardless of either our creativity or our intelligence? I think I wholly disagree with the greatest genius of the twentieth century. Hmm. Maybe I just need to drink more university tea!

Happy Half-Term!

Well, it's the last few days of a whole week off school. If you've had such a  break I hope it was nice! There have been homeworks here, and there has been ironing, and still much running to and fro between parents and their somewhat changed circumstances. But there have also been warm temperatures and blue skies, and the first hot cross buns and snowdrops and daffodils and tulips, and lie-ins, and binge watching (highly inappropriate for Presbyterian teenagers) episodes of Cuckoo...

Spring is coming x

the important things

i used to be quite fascinated with e e cummings. what I should really do now is dive into the vast and deep waves of internet information and remind myself of even one of his poems. but this is the post-truth world so i'll plough on regardless.


i lay in bed last night wondering what it would be like to write a blog post without capital letters. I decided that the capital letter could probably fall out without too much confusion but that I really wouldn't want to do without punctuation. I came to the conclusion that a full stop really is necessary to show that you think that what you have just said makes sense. maybe that's why so many of our politicians don't seem to draw much breath. I listened to boris on the today programme this morning. goodness, i'll miss john humphries.


the apostrophe however or the comma. they do seem elusive to more than gcse english students. I have long thought that in a decade or so the apostrophe will be lost entirely to pedantry.


its probably good to reflect now and then on the important things as long as sanity isnt sacrificed. thats where we are here on the whole brexit thing. will we be british by the end of it or will our nearly arbitrary 1916 border become so soft that that is erased from the next chapter of this small island's turbulent history altogether?


question marks. do we need question marks. we probably need questions. answers would be nice too... (ellipsis. im keeping ellipsis.)