Author: bob

I took our younger 3, H and C (the Beans’ Spanish daughter) on a trip to Parliament that the local Home Ed group had organised. I think one of the highlights was A saying “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be”, which was nice.

We got down to Embankment on the train and Tube, then walked along the river to Parliament. We passed the Battle of Britain memorial, and stopped to talk about it. Lunch was in the grass that’s in the middle of the roundabout thing just outside Parliament, with statues of leaders around two edges (Peel, Mandela, Gandhi etc.) and lots of flags on another. A short stroll to the education centre at the other end of the building, and we met up with the rest of the group – going past a statue of Richard I, and meeting by a statue of Emeline Pankhurst (lots of statues). Airport security, although we didn’t have to take off our shoes, and then onto the tour.

We couldn’t get into the chambers themselves, as they were busy being used by politicians (who’d have thought it). It actually turned out quite well, as the education centre has a room where they have lots of projectors and can make it look like you’re in the middle of the chamber. The guide had an iPad that controlled it all, and could play clips of the Speaker saying “Order, order” etc, and he put silhouettes of the PM etc and other explanations on top of the photos. He was very good – informative, engaged the children and seemed to be glad that we were there. After that we were led around the public bits of the building that weren’t in use, and at the end we got back to the education centre and I thought that was it.

No! We were handed over to another person in another room, who said “I’ll be with you for the next hour”. I thought that this might drag, but she was really good too, and I think the children got quite a lot out of it. She had the children divided up among tables, with a rosette each on it. There tables were constituencies, and the rosettes were parties. Each child picked a rosette, then had to get together with the rest of their party to choose a manifesto.

There was a menu of 10 or so points from which they had to pick 3. Each had a price – up to 50p – and the total price had to have 50p added on for contingency. This was a good exercise in presenting a case to convince people, choosing things fairly and so on. These were then presented to the whole group and put up on the screen – it was interesting that all 5 parties had chosen to increase foreign aid.

Then back to your constituencies to vote. You couldn’t vote for yourself. The red party got 3 MPs and the others 1 each. H was one of the red MPs – none of the others with me got elected. A and her fellow not-elected-red candidate got to chose which of the elected red MPs got to be Prime Minister, who was a girl I didn’t know.

All enjoyable and educational, then outside for refuelling and running about for a bit. We walked back to the Tube, and by popular request went to Harrods rather than a museum – I thought they’d done plenty of educational stuff and should have some fun. We went up the Egyptian escalator to the toy and technology departments. The demonstrators in the toy department were excellent, as were some of the toys. It was interesting to see a couple of augmented reality toys, plus a toy that blended a scalextric-type track and cars with a racing app on a smart phone.

Back to the Tube, which was quite a crush for a few stops, for a brief visit to Coram’s Fields – one of my favourite places in London. Unfortunately we only had a short time before it closed, but it was still good.

No more Tube, as King’s Cross was walkable. We stopped for chips to add to sausages K had packed for us, then had to wait aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages at the station for our train’s platform to be announced. Chocolate biscuits to revive flagging spirits, and then back home.

The boys are back where we used to live for another holiday orchestra, also known as no lie-in. J is in the older choir for the first time, K in the younger one, both are doing gamelan (J would want me to point out that he did advanced gamelan), J does recorder and K plays cello in a string band – his first time of cello there.

It has been great as usual, although the driving’s a bit of a chore. So far we’ve not been late, although cut it fine a bit. K managed to leave his cello there, which a nice lady put away safely when I phoned up. Phew!

As well as the tuition and performing, there are mini concerts by professional musicians to inspire them. This year it was Steve Bingham on the violin. He had a normal violin, which he was brilliant on – attempting to accompany himself doing Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes (which brought back memories of my teenage paper round, as 90125 was on my personal stereo at the time). He even did the weird percussive bit in the middle by drumming on the violin.

His main thing is using an electric violin, effects pedals, bass pedals (like on an electric organ) and some other bits and pieces (including a laptop) to record himself live and then loop the recording over and over, adding in many layers of other loops. By the time he’s added in the last layer it’s like he has a bionic violin – when he uses his bow it’s like a whole song comes out and not just one part. Also it’s an interesting combination of live and pre-prepared. He has some programming set up in his kit ready to accept music to record and then repeat, but the music itself is all live. He did a Danish folk tune, Clocks by Coldplay and Pachelbel’s canon – marvellous.

I’m glad that he did say several times that all the gizmos don’t matter if you don’t have the fundamental technique on the violin.

Yes, a Chemistry lecture. I had just got back from a work trip to London when Katy persuaded me to take the children back to where we used to live for a public family Chemistry lecture, while she was out teaching. We managed to feed them quickly and got there just after the introduction, but had to sit near the back. In an ideal world I would have taken just J or J+K, but had to take all of them. L was tired, and while things were happening was fine, but the mild explanations and introductions were too boring. A wriggled, quietly enough, but was further gone than L. The boys enjoyed it though.

The lecturer made me think of someone’s grandfather, pottering around in his shed, showing things to his grandchildren. Some of the things would be because he thought they’d like them, and some were because he just liked them so much he was going to show them anyway. A little bit of explanation, but mostly just fun stuff. That the grandfather happened to have a shed remarkably well stocked in strong and dangerous chemicals, and the grandfather happened to be a Chemistry professor was just by-the-by.

We had squash bottles on launch ramps being jet-propelled by burning hydrogen, burning crisps in liquid oxygen (surprisingly large flame), melting iron, and a clock reaction. He did a couple in enormous glass ball-shaped jars – one was burning phosphorous, which gave off lots of smoke that was lit up by the flames so that it glowed, and the the other was little orange sparks going up like fireflies or baby fireworks – magical.

He also did a bit about the scientific process, how you can only disprove things, and that no matter what the outcome of an experiment you win (by gaining more knowledge). He then blew bubbles in bubble mixture, with the bubbles containing a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, and asked people to say if they thought the bubbles would go bang when he lit them or just burn quietly. They burned quietly as there wasn’t much oxygen.

I dread to think how much all the chemicals cost that he gaily burned or melted in the course of the hour, but it was all good stuff.

It’s been ages since we got back, and even more ages since either of us wrote anything. Oh well.

This year I tried my hand at archery – I’d finally given in and bought myself a longbow at a historical fair, but hadn’t had chance to practice before going. I like longbows. Mine is ash, 35lb pull (which is rather weedy, but could still reach all the targets). Some of the other archers do loads of archery, and some of them have loads of money. So there was a proper 130lb war bow that I couldn’t draw, and lots of 70lb ones which were still rather powerful. I got to get quite a bit less bad at it, and particularly enjoyed clout shooting (shooting at a cloth on a stick at the far end of a field, aiming up into the sky to get more range – nearest the stick wins). Also I learned about archery, and how we defeated the French at Poitiers, Crecy and Agincourt against the odds.

The way that people were using a simple but powerful tool made of wood, how different people had different preferences and so on, made me think a bit about the bit in the first Harry Potter book where he goes to Ollivander’s to get a wand. Another thing that struck me this year, I think partly because of some of the other archers also made bows and chairs etc. was that at Kentwell there are people who can actually make things, real things, rather than words in the Web 2.0 user-generated content meaning of make. One bloke, who makes bowls with his lovely pole-lathe started as a geneticist, then changed to selling industrial amounts of liquid nitrogen and oxygen, and now makes pipes for a living (musical ones, but not bagpipes).

He had a second lathe with him this year, where the pole was a proper bit of timber rather than a chopped bit of tree. He was saying how it was all put together at the last minute, using bits of wood he had lying around the workshop – holly, box, ash etc. This impressed me: not only did he have the various kinds of wood lying around, but he could identify them. Then there
were the basket makers – one lady was making a new basket for her dog. I need a basket for my dog, so I’ll make one. Marvellous. They use wickedly sharp knives to cut the willow.

Anyway, as well as all that there were the usual out of hours things – ceilidhs, a boat race along the moat, green man (celebration of midsummer) eating tea out on the front lawn (A got scared of the peacocks, who can be a pest as they scavenge people’s leftovers, which sometimes haven’t been left yet).

K and L had to zoom back as they were singing in a concert. Fortunately we were just back in time to see the interesting part of the boat race. The concert was for all the music groups associated with the school where they do their Saturday morning music thing. The youngest performer was in their group (a 4 year old girl, who did very well), and the oldest was a six former in one of the school groups. K+L were excellent, enjoyed themselves, and also enjoyed the other groups.

Also, K and L got to be gentry for the day, with minimal effort from us. Normally gentry is a hassle, as the costumes are elaborate and fancy, and you need posh accessories too. The outdoors gentry (visiting gentry from elsewhere) a.k.a. gentry in a pavilion a.k.a. tentry, had some costumes spare that happened to fit K and L. K liked it, and L looked forward to it so much she occasionally literally jumped for joy. After all, it’s not every day you get to be a princess. (See Flickr for the many layers of getting ready.)

Katy’s dad was doing his first Kentwell for quite a few years. In recent years there had been a problem of young lads wandering around in feral gangs. There was a school room in the house, but that was fairly posh and small. So the big cheese PP asked David if he could start a second, less posh, school in one of the barns in order to keep these lads out of mischief. He was given a free hand and more help than most stations get as PP realised it was likely to be an unpopular thing.

David did his usual excellent job of preparation, and it turned out to be somewhere that the boys wanted to be. One of the archers had a son who was supposed to be there but wasn’t, and so was almost dragged there by his dad. Later on I asked the boy how it went and he said it was good. They made a sundial by working out when noon was by shadows and then using an hour glass to do the other hours away from that. They used slates and slate pencils, and did their proper work on one side and used the other to give a score to visiting school parties a la X Factor.

They had clay letters and roman numerals made by a Kentwell potter, and they were taught the pre-1588 way of doing roman numerals: XIV is the same as XVI as the position doesn’t matter – you just add up the individual letters to make 16. So 9 is VIIII. Actually, a run of 2 or more Is has a tail on the last I which makes it look like VIIIJ. Doing division by multiple subtraction is a lot easier if the position doesn’t matter. Oh, and chess played to Tudor rules (no castling, no en passant, and pawns never move 2 spaces). And there was delicious cake, made by David’s partner. Katy took some lovely photos of David and the school, again on Flickr.

As part of the Science festival, I took K, L and A to the Chemistry department. There was an unexpected bit of learning on the walk from the nearest free car park to the department – the very nice playground we went through had a Moebius strip climbing frame. I’m not surpised, given where it was, but it did make me smile and K and L had fun clambering over it.

I have memories of the Chemistry department from when I was a student – 3 9 o’clock Maths lectures there a week in my first year (because it had a large lecture theatre). When you got to the building, getting in was tricky because all the fume cupboards inside were sucking air out of the building and pumping it out of chimneys, which meant that the entrance doors were being sucked shut. My lecturer was Dr. De’Ath (convenient apostrophe), who was an astronomer, and the only thing I actually remember of his lectures was vector area. He held up an inflatable zebra and asked “What’s the vector area of this?” The answer was 0, as it is a closed surface.

Anyway, back to the present. The doors weren’t being sucked shut as the fume cupboards were off. There was a huge scrum in the entrance hall as lots of people were just about to go into a lecture. A quick hello to a local HE family who were about to go in, then we headed off randomly upstairs. The first room we came to had some nice crystal stuff – examples about the size of a rubic’s cube, and some kits for growing salt crystals with some here’s-some-I-prepared-earlier showing how they would work.

The best bit in that room was the liquid nitrogen. As well as the put something in, freeze it, take it out and smash it with a hammer trick (which was done with bananas, apples and an egg) there were two things I’d not seen before with liquid nitrogen. The first was making a chunky nail out of blu tac and then being able to hammer it into a plank of wood. The second was a foam trough that was having a blown up balloon pushed into it. The demonstrator asked us how many balloons we thought were in the trough. She then got some tongs and kept on pulling out more and more balloons. Most of them had gone down to as small as when they weren’t inflated, because all the air inside had shrunk down in the cold. The trough was about the size of 4 adult shoe boxes in 2 rows of 2, and there were 31 balloons in it. She put them on the bench where they warmed up and got back to normal size – the bench was covered with balloons, and it was a very impressive demonstration.

Next was a bit of Chemistry lego i.e. playing with Molymod. K and L made carbon dioxide. There were diagrams of common interesting molecules, and K asked me to make ibuprofen which while not being e.g. DNA is about 10 times as complex as CO2. The students demonstrating had helpfully made some building blocks (though none I could use) and K put the hydrogens on a ring to make benzene. The student said a bit about it (gives you cancer, good at dissolving things) and K said “The man had a dream about snakes eating each other and worked out its structure” – student was impressed and I had a PDM. They do remember some things I tell them 🙂 .

Next door was another student with different bowls to smell. Which was the odd one out? Caraway, dill, rose petals, orange and spearmint. I can’t remember which one it was (but I think they both got it) nor can I remember which chemical was involved, but it was about chirality – four of them had one version of the smelly chemical and the other had its mirror image. That was interesting timing, as that week scientists had worked out the chemistry involved in Thalidomide harming the body. I mentioned that to the student, and he said that even if you could produce a pure sample of the good Thalidomide, your body would turn some of it into the bad Thalidomide anyway. Hmmm…

We then went to a bit where the children could do experiments. There was a lab given over to getting ready – racks of lab coats, boxes of disposable gloves, and boxes of safety specs. I had A on my back and surprisngly they had no baby-wearing lab coats, so we settled for My First Safety Specs for A and caution for me. K and L had the full works – see Flickr.

The experiments were making snot / goo (borax, PVA and colouring), cornflour and water and an excellent demonstration of density. There were beakers with sugar solutions of different strengths, ranging from just water to a saturated solution. The different strengths were coloured differently, and by carefully slurping some up in a pipette and putting it out into a test tube (in the right order) you could make a rainbow.

We were starting to flag a bit, so we headed up to the top floor where there was more liquid nitrogen, but this time to make ice cream 🙂 . K and L were a bit too young to do it themselves, so they watched as a kind student made some for them and then gave us all some. Very nice it was too – very small ice crystals so not hard and crunchy, proper ingredients including cocoa and cream.

As we were going round we’d been doing a trail where you had to find posters about mystery elements. This certainly tested my rusty A level chemistry, but we got through it and collected the prizes just before chucking out time.

As for the title – my dad’s a physicist and was therefore indoctrinated with the view that chemists are just cooks in lab coats.