Friday 3rd November - Out in the town

I had a gap between teaching 30 children to play the recorder in the morning (noisy), and teaching 15 children to play the guitar in the afternoon (should have been 30, but half the children were away on a trip, so less noisy than expected).

So I went into the town to do some errands. First off was paying in a load of cheques. This did not go so well. I fed them into the machine, which made mechanical noises of an unproductive nature for a while and then spat half of them out. "Please reinsert your cheques". I did so, and it regurgitated three of these. Without further interaction, the machine returned to the opening screen ready for the next customer.

Hey! What about my card? Where are my cheques?

I managed to get a cashier to come over, who went and fetched keys, and then a colleague to lock the front door of the bank. It seems that this is a necessary precaution whenever they open up the cheque-and-money-eating machine, in order to prevent anyone rushing in and grabbing all the money from the machine's innards...

Eventually she was able to give me my card. Then she retrieved the cheques and handed them over, each with little oily tooth-marks along one edge. "Would you like to try again?" Not likely, thought I, and posted them into a sort of letterbox to be dealt with later by a real human.

We (because He was by my side) had lunch, and then filled in time before the guitar lesson mooching around.

In Waterstones I saw this;

 which might wean me off too much Freecell

and these,

but one can have too many desk calendars perhaps?

I thought both these cartoons by MATT on the cover of his book were entertaining. The second one, under the sticker, shows The Three Bears sorrowfully agreeing "This Brexit is too hard, and this Brexit is too soft," but short of peeling off the sticker it wasn't possible to discover if there is a Brexit that is just right.

I'm not a fan of cartoon books, as they remind me of visiting the dentist as a child. He used to have a great stack of GILES cartoon books on the table in the waiting room. I always remember Grandma.

Hey! She's got a statue! In Ipswich!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/suffolk/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_9024000/9024384.stm

There's even a Giles website! With cartoons! Those little twins are off again - they were always worth watching in the pictures.

 http://www.gilescartoons.co.uk/cartoon.asp?cartoon=336

Finally, I stopped to take a picture of this piano which has appeared outside the top floor exit of Wilkinsons. I want to use it in a post for www.themusicjungle.co.uk, my music teaching blog.

As we walked away a determined young girl (why wasn't she in school?) made a beeline for it, and started picking out the tune of a pop song.  Isn't that exactly why the piano is there?