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.)

Happy Mole Day!

I had no idea that 23rd October was Mole Day, until last year. Hitherto I had presumed that moles were found in annoying mounds under your camp bed or somewhere on your person. Having been diplomatically advised against Chemistry as an O-Level choice however, I can still not give you a coherent explanation of this third type of mole. I understand only that it involves atoms and cake-baking competitions in school science departments! A key element (see what I did there?) seems to be remembering the cake-baking competition the night before.


This is one of the reasons why I'm struggling to offer up particularly heart-felt thanks this week. So, with a conscious effort and despite the fact that Jo only started baking (and decorating) his entry at 9pm last night, I am nonetheless grateful for two boys who show such enthusiasm for such things. Mattman came up with this year's idea on this very date last year when Jo didn't get ranked at all!


So, yes, I'm very glad for two boys who like school and moles and taking part enough to weigh and mix and wash and cut until really far too late into the night! I'm grateful for schools who still give our children opportunities to do things other than tests and assessments and target-setting. I'm grateful too for Prince Charming who, despite a ridiculously stressful day at work, could throw off that level of responsibility and get down on the floor with scissors and glue. And I am most extremely grateful, after all that effort and very sore feet at midnight, that the child did get joint second place. Thankfully plans for next year are already afoot/apaw, and thankfully we seem to have agreed that some forward thinking could be useful...


The rest is harder. I seem to have put my own paws into It. When I put my foot in It, It does usually happen for all the same reasons and It does usually come from all the same faults, but this doesn't ever appear to make me wiser or better or just quieter really. So, I am trying to be thankful for people, for opinions, for decisions made for all the right reasons. For faith and trust and the authority of good men.


I'm not succeeding at that level of gratitude though, if I'm honest. I am genuinely grateful for folk who have said nice things about me and made me feel better about myself, but that isn't necessarily where growth lies, is it? Back to the preceding paragraph then! Maybe I should try to be grateful for opportunities to do something different, a bit like the Mole in the Wall. Maybe I should be grateful for an opportunity to practise respect and tolerance and patience and submission. And be very, very grateful for a God in whom I can place my doubts and fears and know that He at least is smiling over me hard.

The Lord your God is with you,

    the Mighty Warrior who saves.

He will take great delight in you;

    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,

    but will rejoice over you with singing.”

Zephaniah 3:17 (918!)

Sunday Night Blues

It's October- orange is the new blue!

Just because

 This week I'm thankful just because it's October really! It might actually be my favourite month. It's my favourite month this year anyway! These sunny days don't require suncream, and it's been a warm enough season thus far not to require expensive hours of central heating!

 And yes, the first pumpkin has been bought! This one will be carved but won't last well until Hallowe'en, so I'll get to carve what I want, as opposed to what they will want!  It's a nice dilemma to have- soup or pie? You American folk will have a much wider repertoire than me. What about muffins? Are pumpkin muffins a thing, and do you have a recipe? (I keep typing pumpking! That makes me smile.)

  I am very grateful too for the patience of my resident pumpking who has endured long walks with me over the weekend, and tonight. I am trying to walk off bouts of menopause. Fresh air and outside and moving are three wonderful things. Especially with crunchy leaves, long blue skies (yesterday) and the sharp shining moon (this evening).

Also, school is starting to settle down into a bit of a manageable groove. It has taken its time! But today both of my teaching sessions achieved everything I needed them to, one boy's constant friendliness shouted across the playground was, as it always is, a huge encouragement, and our (English) department has nearly reached the end of all our room changes, so there could soon be an end to packing boxes and dust, dust, dust!

Most importantly, there are only two school weeks left to half-term! Hoorah! (901- less than a hundred to go...)

The Year of the Tome

So, because this has been a day, nay a week, full of lots of things that I am wholly not very good at, I'm going to tell you about something that I am wholly good at. I can read. I can read and read and read until I'm.... I'll not try a Just William pun. (The link is to a seemingly very interesting blog post on the passive aggressive in things feminist. It's there for me to come back to!) Maybe you didn't spend your childhood watching William and Violet.


This year being a very big birthday year for me, I decided that I would do some serious reading. So serious that only tomes would suffice for this weighty year. Twice hitherto had I embarked on the odyssey of Ulysses and twice had got not very far at all. Thrice now have I started it, and Reader, I am nearly there!

I bought my copy of Joyce's epic in Dublin a long, long time ago. I'd gone down with my mother for a day's shopping and sightseeing. We went by bus in those picturesque days before the motorway strode cleanly between the two cities, and you stopped in Drogheda to change buses, Northern Irish to Irish, and to race to the loo. I wasn't even married then, I think. I bought it in a bookshop in St Stephen's Green shopping centre and carried it proudly around with me and my fine literary intentions.


Years later we were all four of us on the hop on hop off tour bus round Dublin, somewhere between Dublin Zoo and the Guinness Storehouse probably, as best reflects our various interests. The garrulous tour guide was on the subject of Joyce and the tome and asked if anyone had read it. Prince Charming felt the need to tell everyone that his wife was reading it. Thankfully not that she had been reading it for nearly two decades. I can tell you that he, the husband, still tells that story. I'm sure Garrulous TG does not.


Reader, I am nearly there and you shall hear all about it. I shall be a veritable garrulous tome tour guide myself. I bet you can hardly wait.

As my pragmatic and very holy friend K recently pointed out: I've nearly finished Joyce but I'm very behind with my Bible. Back in January I also embarked on a chronological reading of the Bible. In fifty years I've read it only twice before from cover to cover- and only now do I notice that I'll have started reading both tomes in their entirety twice before this year's project.


I would highly recommend the chronological sequence. It means that you read the whole of Job shortly into Genesis. What a time that was at the start of this year. By the end I too could only put my hand over my mouth and marvel. It was a much needed read.


Let me not deflect your attention from my being very behind- maybe I'm not as good at reading as I profess. Or rather maybe I'm not as good as giving God His place as all that Outside Tea in Lent set out to achieve. But as the Message says in Matthew 11, I am trying to find the "unforced rhythms of grace", so have given myself the year of being 50 as well as 1968 2018 itself to finish this voyage. That gives me another nine months of grace!


The rule I set myself on the Joyce front was that I wasn't allowed to read any other books until Ulysses was done. There have been two short slips, but I am lining up a pile, physical and metaphorical, of books into which I intend to plunge voraciously soon, oh so tantalisingly soon. Gretchen Joanna reminded me today of Kierkegaard. He's going on the pile too. All other suggestions most gratefully, joyfully and excitedly received- but please don't let any of them be tomes!