In At The Deep End

Since our last post we have between us:

• Been tired and now are rested (K) / even more tired (Katy and me)
• Played in the snow - see Flickr (everyone except me)
• Made a snowduck - ditto
• Not got ready for next week
• Talked about petrol and diesel engines over breakfast, using an empty pint mug and a fist to demonstrate cylinders and pistons (I showed K, then he showed L and asked for the mug to do it properly - his piston wouldn’t have given much compression )
• Been to football practice (J)
• Done the last service before The Big Day - see Flickr again (Katy)
• Built some bridges using a fab free game (pretty much everyone, including some of my colleagues who possibly should have been working )
• Lots of other things that I can’t remember.

I noticed today that F, the 4 year old we often have round for tea on Thursdays, was struggling to use the mouse, which K (also 4) and even L (2) use with relative ease. L in particular has got into poisson rouge recently and her mouse control has come on leaps and bounds, but I think the real breakthrough was when she discovered that clicking and dragging icons on the desktop made them move. We never quite know where anything will be when we get back to the screen!
Hopefully next week I will have more energy to do things with them, rather than sitting feeling sorry for myself and letting them watch far too many videos and play for far too long on the computer; however much I tell myself it’s educational and a break will do them good, I’m still not quite convinced…

1. Bob suggested I should say that I was born in Africa, but I’m not sure this counts as weird; so were millions of other people Instead I shall say that I was brought up by a mother, a father, two sets of grandparents, an aunt and an uncle, each for varying amounts of time. Not sure this is the time to mention my stepmother…
2. I am a life-long member of the Sheila and her Dog society
3. At the beginning of my year abroad I spoke French like a Belgian, apparently :gallic shrug: Slightly better than my next-door neighbour Rairchul, who spoke grammatically perfect French with the most amazing Lancashire accent!
4. I have a degree in Modern and Medieval Languages, which means my French is okay, but my German is 15th - 17th century. My final year dissertation was on Petrarchan imagery in German Baroque love poetry
5. I decided to be a teacher when I was 5 and realised I was going to be too tall to be a ballet dancer
6. I am a “Super Nutty Ultra-crunchy Granola Earth Mama” - allegedly!

Password on request (terms and conditions apply, see in-store for details) - bonus points if you can work out its origin.

I don’t normally go on about geeky toys, and I promise to not make a habit of it. Today we finally joined the ranks of the MP3 Player Owners and got a cheap no-brand 1GB thing which is utterly tiny - it’s not much bigger than an AAA battery. We also got one of those things that plugs into the headphone socket and broadcasts the signal over low-power radio. They’re meant to live in the car, so we can put loads of children’s stuff on the MP3 player and avoid having a clutter of tapes (with the requested tape always left at home), and also get around having no CD player in the car.

I tested it out tonight as I had to pick up some furniture (not Ikea!) and I had one of those wow! moments with technology. There was a thing about the size of a pack of chewing gum that contained a ridiculous amount of music, which it then piped down a wire to a gizmo plugged into the cigarette lighter that turned the pack of chewing gum into a mini radio station, whose signals were then picked up by the aerial on the roof, back down a wire into the car stereo and out through the speakers. (Much of this could have been avoided if the stereo had a socket for a simple wire rather than going via radio waves.)

It was like the first time I put a music CD into a lap top - this shouldn’t have been happening. This tiny bit of electronics was acting like a hi-fi, which is large static black boxes in the corner of the living room. I expect the amazement at the MP3 player and radio thing will wear off soon, just like it did for the lap top. I also expect that the children don’t find it remarkable at all - it’s a normal thing to them, like the computer. I wonder what gizmo they’ll get amazed by when they’re adult, and what gizmo will completely baffle them when they turn into old fogeys.

I also wonder how many car cigarette lighters are actually used to light cigarettes, compared to how many are used as power sockets. I finally wonder how long the range is - if someone travelled in convoy with us in another car, could they pick up Radio Free {insert county here}?

I had one of those experiences tonight where you can see some mental jigsaw pieces fitting into place in your child’s mind. J recently got Asterix in Corsica and Tin Tin and The Red Sea Sharks out of the library, and I read some to him and K for bedtime stories. Once K was in bed I asked J if he could find France and Italy on the globe (his technique: find the UK, then down to the right) and then I showed him where Corsica and Sardinia were. I also showed him where Mecca was (Oh! That’s in my Tin Tin book) and I said it was because there were people in the book who were Muslims, trying to get to Mecca. This led onto the pillars of Islam and I remembered all but the most important one (the one about God and Mohammed). I’m not sure I’d get 10 out of 10 on the Ten Commandments either

Once we were in post-children time there was a programme on Channel 4 about militant Islam being preached from mosques in the UK, because of the influence of wealthy people and organisations in Saudi Arabia. The imams they filmed via hidden camera encouraged the faithful to: homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, being anti-Christian (is there a better word?), and the violent interpretation of jihad. All very unpleasant.

There must be a subversive in the Channel 4 programming department, because the programme immediately after the militant Islam one was… Celebrity Big Brother!

A little while ago there was a programme on the BBC called What Makes Britain Rich? by Peter and Dan Snow, which compared the UK economy now with how it was in the 1950s. It was a bit light in places, but it was still very good - Peter Snow could relate to the world of the 1950s, Dan Snow is a child of the modern world, and much of the programme was about how the two worlds were so different.

The major difference was the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the Knowledge Economy. We used to see ourselves as the workshop of the world; you had a job for life - school + job = conveyor belt from birth to retirement. But it went pear-shaped in the 70s and 80s: There were lots of clips of Peter Snow reading the news from the 80s, which formed a very depressing list of “company X is closing its factory in city Y with the loss of Z jobs”, and some equally depressing interviews with people from towns where the pit and/or factory had shut and nothing opened up in its place.

The new world was a big contrast to the old. No job for life - you have to hop from job to job like stepping stones across a river. The people interviewed said they didn’t mind having a large student debt, didn’t stress too much over not having a pension sorted, but didn’t expect the state to take care of them. There was an excellent bit were a mother and daughter were interviewed by the Snows and quite quickly the four divided up with Mum + Peter Snow putting their head in their hands in concern over the attitudes of their offspring to money, career and so on.

I’m a member of the Knowledge Economy myself, and the future apparently looks rosy for people like me. The Knowledge Economy makes up a bigger slice of the UK economy than of any other country in the world. While I was watching the programme, particularly the bit I with the mother and daughter, I couldn’t help thinking that the UK manufacturers used to think that their future was rosy too. The new and young usually see themselves as the end-product of history, the result of learning from all those mistakes in the past - we’ve got it right now. They don’t see that the same history that rolled up to them will continue to roll and they’ll be old and out-of-date soon. (How new is the New Forest any more?)

Admittedly there are some changes that happened during the 80s restructuring that probably won’t need to be done again. The change away from a job for life, the need to look after your own career and so on. But I can’t see how the Knowledge Economy will stay perfect and shiny forever, and today’s bright young things with the world at their feet will turn into tomorrow’s dinosaurs with poor prospects.

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In case you never knew or have forgotten, the title of this post isn’t using my own words.

The year has properly started now. We’ve been doing explicitly educational things with the children again, and this has been made easier by the furniture shuffling and clearing out that we did over the holidays. (Woo-hoo! We know how to celebrate Jesus’ birthday! And Katy’s!) So, now each of the children has their own drawer with their current workbooks in, and we have other stuff on shelves or in plastic crates. It makes life much easier this way - the children know where to get things from and occasionally *gasp* get things out by themselves. I try to get the boys started on some English or Maths before I leave for work, so that they don’t have chance to get into can’t-be-bothered mode after breakfast which also makes life easier for Katy. (We now have to do the same magic to the rest of the house, which is not something that I’ll write up like this:
We sorted out the rest of the house. And then we had lunch.)

Katy’s been battling a nasty cold / cough / general bleurgh feeling for nearly a fortnight, which she’s now finding rather boring. But she has found several games on Miniclip, including the cousin of Lemmings called Scribble. The children all like it - L does some with help from Katy and so learns better mouse control, and J is quite into it. It helps with problem solving and forward thinking I reckon, and doesn’t involve death or gore.

J’s football started again and he enjoyed it again, despite it being less well-run than usual as one of the proper instructors didn’t turn up so emergency random instructors / parents filled in. On the way back from football we picked up L’s Bookstart pack from the library so now she has her own book bag and two books. I really like BookStart - it’s a state-funded thing that is at least partly successful in its aims, which are very noble ones (getting children to like books and reading, to get parents to encourage reading and not rely on TV or computers, and as a by-product spend time reading with their children and not shouting at them etc.). No massive intrusive waste-of-money database, no mis-calculation of how much people owe (it’s always 0) - it just works as far as I can see. It’s too easy to be cynical about state-run things, so I have to remind myself of when things work.

K got a dinosaur moulding kit for Christmas, where you pour plaster of paris into dinosaur moulds, paint the dinosaurs and turn them into fridge magnets or badges. He finished off the first batch yesterday by painting them - he did a good job and he’s chuffed with making something he enjoys. There’s a local HomeEd group meeting tomorrow about favourite things - he’s asked to take pizza and his Uneversaurus book which my parents got him for Christmas and he loves (with good reason - it’s excellent).

J bought a chess set in a tin with some pocket money last week and we played with it for the first time today (him vs. K and me). J and K insist on calling the foot-soldiers prawns, although K did experiment with prunes. With these exceptions K’s got the names of the pieces sorted, and how they can move basically OK. J’s at the stage where I’m trying to get him to think what his opponent could do in the move after his i.e. plan ahead a bit. If we do this regularly they’ll quite quickly realise how shallow my chess skill is and start beating me - time to start learning how to do it properly rather than relying on pinning the king in the back row with two rooks.

Another way in which the year has properly started is we had our covenant service today. The start of the Methodist church year is officially in September some time - ministers change churches on the Big Day in September and so on - but I always think it starts in January at the covenant service, and it’s the time to make the more meaningful New Year’s resolutions.

J and I had an interesting discussion during and after the service. At one point the service includes “holy catholic church” and he thought that was wrong because we were in a Methodist church using a Methodist service book. I said that it meant “including all sorts of things or people”, and pointed out the noun/adjective and big/little C differences. Then we went on to decoding the Christian jargon a bit - folly, sin, mercy, salvation - which aren’t everyday words.

Oh, and Prison Break starts again tomorrow, and Law and Order: Criminal Intent already has. Woo hoo! I like watching dramas where the hero is clever and doesn’t just punch their way to success. I feel sorry for Eames sometimes - she’s a bit like Watson, just padding out Holmes’ flashes of brilliance so that they can be fully appreciated rather than blurring into one.

THE RULES

Each player of this game starts with the ’six weird things about you’ blog post. People who get tagged need to write their own six weird things post and state the rules clearly. At the end of the post tag six more people and don’t forget to leave a comment on their blog to tell them they have been tagged and tell them to read your blog.

It’s hard to step outside yourself and to think what the majority of people would think weird, as I’m fairly used to myself!

1. I go to church - I believe in God and the Big Bang.
2. I barely drink, in fact it’s usually easier to say I don’t drink at all. I don’t like the taste of beer, wine, cider or most spirits, and even the stuff I do like is nice for a sip or two and then fairly quickly becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. I’m long passed the stage of having to fit in, so why force myself to do something I don’t like? I do, however, like chocolate.
3. I (help my wife to) home educate. Katy does the lion’s share, much better than I would.
4. I can remember the registration number of the car my mum had when I was at school (XAR 636S) but can’t remember the things that Katy asked me to do earlier in the day. (This might be just laziness and/or being male.)
5. I’m allergic to some general anaesthetics.
6. My favourite word is cran.

People I’m burdening: Katy, Elizabeth, Dave H, and three people who don’t exist.