Thursday 26th July 2018 - What we did yesterday - part 1

But first I must say, when I clicked on the blog to start this post, the picture that I drew of flowers  came up, and looked across at the fireplace where they all are, and saw

they don't look so happy this morning! But I can't easily go and get some water for them yet, as all doors to the kitchen are closed to prevent the cats escaping - they are due for their annual trip to the vet in half an hour and we don't want to spend that time hunting them round the house. At least they can't get under the bath anymore.

We spent the day in London yesterday - it was sweltering. I can't remember it being this hot since 1976, but at least we haven't started water shortages yet. The plan was to visit the V and A museum and see an exhibition called "The Future Starts Here" or something similar. Then to go to see a musical called "89 Days" at "The Other Palace Theatre", which has been written and is being performed by a group of students in and around Bristol University. My reason for going is that I know the lyricist, Clare Packham; she did her grade 5 theory with me, and I accompanied some of her violin exams (but chickened out of her Grade 8 - too many notes for the pianist)

We never made it to the exhibition - it's like looking something up in an encyclopaedia (remember those) or a dictionary - you meet so many interesting things along the way...

In a fit of extravagance after a particularly tiring morning at the Royal Brompton earlier this year, I took out a membership of the V and A, which gives free access to exhibitions, and also access to the Member's Room, a lovely, lovely lounge/restaurant on the fifth floor. At the time I tried to pretend to myself that I hadn't been totally reckless - the truth is that it was a brilliant idea. We had lunch in the member's room - He had steak, I confused the system by having two starters. All the dishes were excellent. Then we started. There were a few things we wanted to see;


Gloucester candlestick, falcon flagon, Serilly Cabinet,


and a whole load of things we didn't set out to see such as the Mirror Cabinet, glass virginals

this extraordinary wallpaper in the children's area of the silver collection

where some of the boxes had doors, with little showcases of silver models inside

and an exhibition of early computer generated pictures

and, right at the beginning of our visit, I saw a flight of stairs... Roman? or Greek? going nowhere...

Having trawled through various floors and rooms (how my mother would have loved the Gilbert collection, and also the Dutch items from when Amsterdam was the richest city in the world) we went back to the Members' Room for revivifying tea or coffee and cake, before heading to the theatre.

(Is this post too long? OK, I'll start a new one)

Wednesday 24th July - yesterday

Leaving a school where you have worked for fifteen or more years is slightly difficult - not the "leaving" bit, that was quite hard, but the actual handing over your security access key and walking out of the door.

Had I said good-bye to everyone, everywhere?

Well, that's that, I've gone now. Just endless folders on the computer, shelves of lists and lesson plans and resources, several hours of pressing "delete" or chucking stuff into recycling... and hopefully I'll be clearing a few inches of bookshelf space and a few bytes on the computer, and reclaiming a few hours of time.

They gave me these;

I enjoyed doing this rough sketch on the note-taking app on my tablet, using my finger instead of the stylus. The vase is a straight cylinder...

Then - time, time, time - but I felt cranky and out-of-sorts. Eventually, after lunch, I copied a quick water colour of the Venice Lagoon 

Result! I have learned how to do water by letting the paint break up as you brush over the paper! The tower is a bit fuzzy because I didn't wait long enough for the sky to dry. I'm still using the journal that daughter gave me for all these try-outs; there's something about a brand new sketchbook that is too intimidating. I have a method of avoiding the "I don't want to spoil the first page" syndrome which I can recommend; start on the last page and work backwards... Although some future viewer of my sketchbook might puzzle over why a relatively adequate start got worse and worse as they progressed through the pages...

Then He had the bright idea of going for a jaunt to Hove - no, not the sea front, but two of my favourite shops are on opposite sides of the same street - Lawrence, the art shop, and Ackermans music shop. Both with air-conditioning. So I had a splendid time in the shops, buying brushes and just one half-pan of watercolour (what is the difference between yellow ochre, which one art book suggests, and raw sienna? Almost nothing - the raw sienna is fractionally more brown. One writer states that the raw sienna won't make greens, so that could be it - using raw sienna might cure some of the dullness I am getting. Aha. I'll give it a go!) Meanwhile He prowled around in the sweltering sun, and found a water sports lagoon where you can go wakeboarding which looks like crazy good fun for lots of people... (not me!) 

The music books were just a selection for pupils - what might enthuse this boy, or that girl, and how to move a talented child onwards with technique... The "Dozen a Day" exercises that I used to do when I was a 9-year-old are still some of the best on the market. Book 1 is seemples, Book 6 would give me serious pause for thought!

I'm ecstatic that all three pupils passed their music exams; one will be delighted that she passed (a bit close, but she was touch-and-go), another will be happy with his merit, and the last might be disappointed that he just missed a merit (but he is very young, only six, and gets distracted by Everything!). I'm waiting for the written reports to get an idea of what actually happened in the exams. This morning's "eat the frog first thing in the day" was texting all the parents to let them know. 

Monday 23rd July 2018 - And that's (nearly) that

Taught two lessons today - the last two of the academic year. All that remains is to go to a leaver's assembly tomorrow morning and then I can turn my attention to ...

clearing out the teacher bags
deleting old school registers (GDPR)
sorting out my teaching resources
reshuffling my timetable
answering 30 outstanding emails

reading, writing, playing the piano, lolling about, sleeping, doing what I please

The long weeks of searing hot weather continue; at lunchtime I filled tubs of water as a first stage in the watering-the-garden process;

Let's do some sums;
the small red and blue tubs contain around 8 l water, and there are 3 of them
the big red tub takes 6 small red or blue tubs to fill
the green tubs take 4 small tubs
the big blue tub takes 3 small tubs...

that's 24 small tubs of water, at 8 l each which is 24 trips to and from the kitchen tap carrying a total of 144 l water, or 144 kg. I've used just about all that water now, watering the garden.

I've also been experimenting with going over a pen sketch with a wet paintbrush... (copy of a sketch in a "how to draw book")

and daring to risk adding colour to an ink sketch, using my wonderful colour-change multi-8 pencil 

(copy of photograph of view through staff room window)

  Hmm - I'm happy enough with these for now.

Saturday 21st July - Random Sightings

OK. The keyboard re-arrangement on my laptop is fixed! But I'm using the "mainframe" for convenience and speed.

The book is called "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles; I'm enjoying it, but find it needs to be read in small portions. Why? I'm not sure; perhaps it is many-layered and dense and vivid and idiosyncratic?   Anyway, it is the current book club choice. So far the book club is doing exactly what I had hoped - introducing me to all kinds of books which I wouldn't have thought of reading.



Anyway, back to the random sightings....

On Thursday night I thought I met a train coming down the steep hill that I was driving up to get to the school show. The hill is steep, the lane is narrow, the trees grow closely overhead and this huge, brightly-lit unidentifiable method of transportation came thundering down towards me, using a good deal of my side of the road. Once I had recovered from a simutaneous sudden dive towards the earth bank at my side of the road and application of brakes, and then rapid change down several gears and got the Corsa moving again, I was able to process what I had seen and conclude it was some kind of truck. Ugh.

Today, after work (yeah, some of us work on Saturday mornings, but this is the last until September whoop whoop) we were pondering where to go for lunch. He came up with "Lamingtons" in Bletchingley-  we were there about this time last year (17th June - I've just checked). It was only half an hour away, (through some of the beastliest lanes we have driven down in a long, long while - memo to self, don't follow the satnav through the back ways) just as we remembered it. He had smoked salmon and scrambled egg on toast, I had home-made quiche and salad.

Then, where to go next? Downe House, where Charles Darwin lived, is only half-an-hour away from Bletchingly, so we went there (down little lanes which require a whole new scale for beastliness - eroded verges, potholes, lack of passing places... I hadn't written myself that memo re satnav yet).

On the way, I spotted a Darth Vader mannequin in an old-fashioned telephone box - in Westerham, should you wish to check it out. The first link gives you the Westerham page - it seems Father Christmas is in residence. The second link gives you the google maps page - it's called Verrall's Corner on the A25. I couldn't get a picture of Darth Vader - the lights changes, and anyway it was all dark in there. It was a lady in a blue frock (the Queen?) on the day the google van went through...

Down House was very interesting - the house, the contents, the Darwin family. I even bought a guide book. You'll get much better pictures than this on the English Heritage website.

"The house is old and ugly" said Charles. But it had a great atmosphere.

The ground floor rooms are as they would have been when the Darwin family lived there, and upstairs an exhibition of Darwin's life and work. There were phrases of his "origin of the Species" on the walls - his descriptions were delightful. Also, he hated the sea.

I'm sure we used to play Downe House Girls School at Lacrosse when I was at school - well, not me, I was useless at lacrosse. The school is in Newbury now, but started here in Charles Darwin's house in 1907, after the family moved out.

We had tea and cake; I loved the little ants marching over the spoon marking the table number.



I don't think I have eaten zucchini - or courgette as I would have said - cake before today. This one had a lime and pistachio nuts and was delicious.

And in the spirit of Natural history, this tiny feather was caught on a roughness of the table; just a blur in the photograph, but a glorious miniature of yellow and green and grey in reality.

We came home through main roads, A roads and motorways. Took a scant hour and was a lot less taxing than the outward journey.

Friday 20th July - Morning Luxury

I baled out of attending a school assembly this morning, and am having a slow start to the day instead. The last two evenings have been taken up by the school show at one of the schools - the last time I was there in any formal role. (Halleluia).

Today is relatively straightforward. I need to be up and ready by 11.20 am to go to  a staff social at The Three Crowns (or is it The Crown - there's only one pub in that tiny village, and I'm getting a lift so I don't really care about the small details). And then be back in time to go to another staff social this evening...

I've just started reading "A Gentle
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Monday 16th July - Trucking on towards the holidays

No milk delivered today, so we thought...

until I spotted an empty carton down by the back gate later this morning.

How did it get there? Foxes - are they thirsty? have they discovered a taste for milk? Or are they just messing about?

It took me a while to search a bucket that was deep enough to cover a 2 litre milk carton but I discovered this one in the garden. It dates back to the 1980s, as it is part of the fittings of our very dated kitchen!
 

I'm hoping that weighting it down with a half brick might be enough to keep the milk safe.

The weather is still HOT.

The cat spent the whole day crammed into this cardboard box. How could she be comfortable in there?  How could she not be sweltering in there?

I'm double booked for two book clubs tonight, as they have both moved their nights. I'm glad that I've baled out of both of them; he's come back pretty tired from putting up curtains in daughter's flat, a long hot drive and a long hot detour away (blue flashing lights at Bury Hill), and I have taught nine piano lessons and gone to the dress rehearsal of the school show. And watered the garden - about a dozen or so 7l buckets of water to fill at the sink and carry around the garden!

So we are half awake, half asleep in front of the television, grateful for a cool breeze wafting through the room.