Just to improve the mental health of our vast readership, here’s part 4.
We went back to where we used to live, to see a play put on by the theatre company run by a local home educating mum. I got the bus there from work and as I’d arrived before Katy and the others (who’d come straight from a birthday party of another home educating family) I had time to explore the new John Lewis and attached shopping centre (one of the 3 that sprouted up recently there).
The Apple store was weird – just a huge Apple logo on the outside (no words) and that lots of tables with all the products on – again no writing or big displays. The place was packed with foreign language students doing free web-surfing on the computers, and I got about 30 seconds to try to get to grips with the photo thing on an iPhone but it defeated me. Ridiculously good looking, but not worth the money (unless I could also turn it into a light sabre). A colleague has got an application for his 3G iPhone that can listen to a piece of music e.g. played over the PA in a pub and then tell you what it is (so that you could buy it, I suppose). Neat.
Anyway, there was a posse of five or so home educating families in all. Merlin was played by the man who led drama sessions with some of them (including J and K) and it was very good. My only gripe were the 2 occasions where they aimed at pleasing any 11 year olds in the audience by setting up a swear word and then avoiding it at the last minute – gratuitous and not funny unless you’re 11. The children all enjoyed it, even though they were hungry because the chinese food I’d bought beforehand was too hot / too slimy to eat.
