Friday October 31st - The Poppies

Yesterday we had a day out in London doing what we wanted to do, seeing what we wanted to see, eating what we wanted to eat - in other words, just pleasing ourselves.

While we were waiting for our food to arrive at the end of the day, I made notes of everything we'd seen and done - pretty much filling the paper placemat they give you at Wagamama. I expect it may form the basis for blog posts for days to come.

Right now, I'm thinking about the poppies filling the moat at the Tower of London. I've seen various people's pictures on twitter, and known for ages that I wanted to go and see them for myself.


There were indeed a sight to behold.

 
When the sun comes out, they glitter. What they don't do is move. There they are, frozen, vibrantly red, deathly still.

Wednesday 29th October - A Day to Remember

On a day near the 26th November, back in about 1988, I had a Day To Remember.

It was a birthday present from my husband, and it was a Day Off.

The plan was that for the whole day I could do exactly as I pleased, leaving the two children (number 1 son, two-and-a half-years, and delightful daughter, fourteen months old) to the tender mercies of their father.

It took a certain amount of planning, writing out their schedule for the day, making sure that their clothes were all to hand and that there was everything that might possibly be needed. Then, on the Day, I got up early and caught the train to London.

I can remember almost everything I did that day;
visiting the fabric department at Liberty's and spending almost an hour deciding whether or not to buy a beautiful printed woolen shawl (I succumbed),

mooching around a little market beside St-Martin's-in-the-Fields where I bought an intricately carved jigsaw for the Main Man,

taking my time looking at everything in the Design Centre which was somewhere near Regent Street at the time (do you remember that it had a strangely curved street window?) and buying two more beautiful wooden jigsaws for the children

lunch, at a time of my choosing, in a place that I liked the look of, without reference to when other people might be feeling hungry, or what they might prefer to eat

an evening meal, again, eating what I wanted without considering anyone else

I returned home late in the evening to find that the children were tucked up in bed. I had spent the whole day as myself, not as wife, or mother, or as anyone else.

That day sustained me through years and years of humdrum everyday life. Let's face it - the people who actually ENJOY the never-ending cycle of food shopping, everyday meal preparing, laundry, ironing, hoovering, dusting, bed-making, are few and far between and I am not one of them. But groaning my way through all these loathsome tasks just made everything much worse. So, when the daily grind of all the never-ending, repetitive, dull and boring tasks that running a house entails threatened to get me down, I would cast my mind back to the velvet and brocades in Liberty's, or the little open-air cafe in a garden where I had lunch, or any of the other delights of the Day Off.

That was my "Respite Day", a momentary relief from being a full-time carer of our children. Everyone needs a Day Off, to enable them to return to the necessary work of day-to-day life with renewed energy and something to lift their spirits as they go about the normal daily round.

Wednesday 15th October - Time off

It's been a while since the last post - three weeks?

Well, it was about three weeks ago that I started a coughing sort of cold, which meant interrupted nights, which meant that come the evening I tended to just sit about half asleep, which meant that I really didn't feel like blogging.

It's an occupational hazard of being a primary school teacher, and a music teacher at that. I reckon to pick up some kind of lurgy in the first month.

I took a couple of mornings off work last week, to see if that would do the trick. It sort of worked, but after this morning's teaching I decided to take the rest of the week off - at least as far as thrashing round the country from one school to another, and rallying classes of children to embrace their ukuleles rather than use them as pretend weapons, and wrangling enthusiastic young samba bands into some kind of coherence goes.

So, today, after a couple of instrumental lessons, and a visit to another school en route in order to follow up some missing keyboards, I came home, had a cup of coffee, and cancelled the rest of the week. It's likely I have a bit of a chest infection - just enough to make my legs slightly wobbly, and my head slightly hot. In the old days I would have taken a super-max aspirin and got on with things. These days, the chest specialist has given me a course of antibiotics to keep at the ready and told me that if I think I have a chest infection, I should START taking them and STOP working. And who am I to argue with the specialist? I've done well, though - nearly six weeks into term before the first chest infection (to which I am depressingly prone).

I do feel a bit of a fraud - not "properly" ill. But experience has told me that I won't get better unless I do exactly that. Now's my chance to actually READ some of the books I've loaded onto my Kindle, and catch up on sleep, and generally flop about for a few days.