The Summer FOMO list

School’s out for summer.

Whatever town you live in there will be drunk teachers everywhere. Teachers will be having coffee that they manage to stretch from 10 until 12. There will be teachers visiting art galleries and going to the cinema - at night and on a weekday. Long lunches with friends, (Oh yes, teachers will remember they have friends) will become a regular feature of their days.  Teachers will spend time with their own families. Teachers will read. They won’t just read policy documents and children’s writing but they will have time for a novel, or unwisely an article in the Daily Mail designed to poke a teacher into sharing the article over every form of social media, with an angry face emoji. They will still spend some time thinking about next year, possibly cutting out display letters in front of the TV, but they will have so much more energy because they won’t be playing a live action version of whack-a-mole with thirty children every day between 8.30 and 3.30. Teachers will swear and stop saying things like, “You have a choice. You are in control of your own body and you can choose not to hit people when you are cross,” and their eyebrows will slowly relax into a normal position. Some teachers will travel, or go on an adventure, or get married. Teachers love the summer holidays.

I started in summer holiday mode before I’d actually finished (because I’m a part-timer) with a long coffee with a friend. I had a peppermint tea and attempted a spot of tasseography.

“Is that a question mark,” I asked my friend, swirling my cup around under her nose. We agreed it was and wondered what it means. Google urged caution but maybe it was just asking me to think about how I’m going to best use these six weeks.

The Long Suffering Husband was keen to take a holiday but thinking about flying was making me quite anxious, so he gave up on the idea. I was quite relieved but then I felt guilty.
“I know,” I said, “Why don’t we use the money we would have spent and have a summer of adventures in the UK? Let’s make a list of all the things we’ve never done that we’d like to and see how many we can tick off.”
“Like a bucket list?” He wasn’t entirely convinced.
I assured him I had no intention of calling it a bucket list; that’s only if you are dying.
“We can call it our FOMO list,” I told him. “Fear of missing out,” I added to smooth his wrinkled brow.

I had more to put on the list than he did. He tends to be better at just doing whatever he wants when it occurs to him. The more I thought about it the more ideas I came up with.  When I was walking I met a couple by the falls who told me that they were here because they had the salt and thought they should visit the place. I considered a food tour of the uk but I’ve already eaten Pork Pies at Melton Mowbray and Weetabix in Welwyn Garden City.

Summer 2019 FOMO list

• Adventure golf at Prom
• Cruise river from prom or sail on a barge
• Hamilton
• Waitress
• Royal Academy Exhibition
• Skybar london (walkie talkie building
• Visit Highgrove
• Visit a coronation meadow
• Tank museum
• Catch up with friends
• Visit more National Trust properties
• Lost gardens of Heligan
• Chips at Whitby
• Do a. Escape room
• Go to a balloon festival
• See Shakespeare at the Globe
• See Shakespeare in Stratford upon Avon
• See a kingfisher in the wild
• Beth Chatto garden
• Swim at the Olympic pool 
• Hampstead Heath and Highgate cemetery 
• Swim in Hampstead ponds
• Banstead lavender fields
• British Library
• See otters in the wild
• Have tidy cupboards
• Be organised
• Get allotment ready for next year
• Read lots
• Write something
• Duxford
• Eat at a Michelin stared  restaurant
• York Minster
• Durham
• East coast Yorkshire 
• Eat a Yorkshire pudding in Yorkshire
• Try Pontefract cake in Pontefract or Bakewell Tart in Bakewell.

The LSH has taken the list as a personal challenge. Today we go to catch up with my daughter, the next day York, then Durham followed by Whitby, travelling back down the east coast and eating Yorkshire puddings.  Maybe the question mark in my tea leaves was to remind me to add ‘rest and relax’ to my list.

Stories from the Swimming Pool

There have been several novels recently set in swimming pools (I particularly liked the Lido and wasn’t so keen on Sally Red Shoes) and outdoor pools seem to be all the rage. I wonder if that’s because swimming pools are great places to collect stories. When writers get a bit stuck they can find that going for a walk or a swim helps bits of story slot into place. The regularity of the activity, the keeping the body active all give the brain a chance to do its filling.  But in a swimming pool, there are also people and people make stories if you are quiet and you listen.

I thought I’d share yesterday’s story. It was quite a rollercoaster of emotions, as I stood silently in the next door changing room, barely able to breathe. It had the quality of a radio 4 play, so I will write it as a script. The two characters, who I will call Emily and Holly, just because they are common names for girls of about ten or eleven, had just finished their swim (I was just about to start mine). Imagine the sounds of the swimming pool in the background.....
Holly: I was going to the zoo with him but I’m not now.
Emily: Let's use this one.
(The sound of the cubical door closing is heard followed by giggling)
Holly: (singsongy voice) We’ve been swimming now I’m going to do a video
Emily: (panic rising in her voice) No don’t do that. Really. No don't do it. You don’t need to. You don’t need to let everyone know what you are doing every minute of every day.
Holly: Oh....Oh, okay, if you say I shouldn’t.
Emily: I’m sorry. I’m being bossy. I’m sorry. I don’t meant to be bossy. You can ignore me if you want to.
Holly: No. It’s ok. Let me check my likes. 43! I’ve got 43 likes just today. (Sings a little song) Forty three like, I’ve got forty three likes. Forty three likes in just one day. (Dramatic increase in pitch) Forty five likes, forty five likes, forty five likes in just one day.
Emily:  I haven’t got Instagram so I don’t know but my Nanny says she heard on the news that they are going to get rid of the likes. They say having the likes makes people do silly things. I mean I don’t know but Nanny says they’re going to stop it.
Holly: Really?
Emily: Yeah, I dunno but my Nan says..
Holly: Oh well. I’ll miss it.
Emily: Yeah, you would.
Holly: Maybe your Nan’s wrong.
Emily: She isn’t normally. I don’t really know because I don’t have it.
Holly: Bad luck.
Emily: My phone can’t do it. It makes calls and everything but it doesn’t connect to the internet. It hasn’t got any apps.
Holly: (still upbeat) How do you live without the news app?
Emily: News?
Holly:  Yes I love news. You can click on it anytime and find out exactly what is happening anywhere in the world. I love it.
Emily: I wish I hadn’t worn leggings. Can you help me?
Holly: (laughing) It’s really difficult to get leggings on when you’re wet.
Emily: Thanks
(Sound of cubicle door opening)
Emily: So, are you going to the zoo another day?
(Voices fade into distance)

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Dangerous Skills

“Did you see the telly this morning,” the lollipop man asked me gleefully.
“No. I don’t watch much TV and never in the morning,” I replied.
“Well you should have done. They were talking about you.”
I very much doubted that I had become the latest thing that enraged Piers Morgan but I did ask.
“Really?”
“You are going to get prosecuted. They are going to make it illegal because it’s dangerous.”
I was confused until he nodded towards my book.
“They’ve made walking a reading illegal?” I laughed. “I knew they’d get me somehow,” and I walked on quickly.

The lollipop man isn’t normally grumpy and people tell me his is a very nice man. I don’t really talk to him because I cross the road further up but I always lift my nose from my book, give him a warm smile and say, “Good morning.” I only see him on the days I’m a little bit late and never in the evening because teachers don’t generally work 9-3 . However, my newly practised skill bothers him.

He’s not alone. People find it pushes some primeval button. It provokes a reaction in them that seems a little out of place. Old people get cross. People say things like, “I saw this mad woman walking and reading and then I realised it was you,” or “That new skill of yours is both impressive and scary in equal measure.”

One of the books I read was Milkman. The main character says, “Often I would walk along reading books. I didn’t see anything wrong with this but it became something else to be added as further proof against me. ‘Reading-while-walking was definitely on the list.” . It’s set in Northern Ireland   during the ‘troubles’ and this walking and reading makes everyone more angry than they are about    any other awful thing that is happening.

Like Anna Burn’s character, I don’t see anything wrong with it. In a world full of things to really worry about, someone walking and reading shouldn’t get people quite so hot under the collar. When I told my family about the conversation with the lollipop man, they were worried for me.
“Is it true?” my daughter asked.
I have no idea, or interest in it’s veracity, although I do not see why reading and walking would be an offence. If you weren’t very good at it the person you are most likely to hurt is yourself. I explained this to the Long Suffering Husband. “I suppose you could walk into the road and cause an accident.”
“So could you, “ I told him indignantly. “If I’m clever enough to read and walk then I know to look before I cross the road.”

Maybe people don’t like it because it’s different.  It is much easier than you think it is, so if you’d  like to give it a go and make me appear normal I’d appreciate it and you never know, it might be the best thing you ever did.

Reading and Walking Expert

The ‘Expert in a Year’ challenge I set myself was that I would read and walk at the same time.

I am already an expert in setting myself small challenges before I move on and try something new, hence the name of my blog. I can play the piano and several woodwind instruments other than the flute badly, I take photos, I learnt every flag from every country, I knit (baby clothes because I don’t have time for bigger things), I swim (as near to every day as I can manage) without ever perfecting a stroke, I do yoga but still can’t get my knees to the floor in badhakonassana, I can make several origami items but still haven’t managed 1000 paper cranes, I used to be able to juggle (some skills disappear if you don’t keep practising), I do a crossword every day and enjoy a codebreaking puzzle and I do a bit of writing. Now, if you add up the hours in the day and the things I do, you can see why I’ll never actually be an expert in anything. I’m a bit of a magpie when it comes to skill collecting.

In September, when we were asked to set our challenges, I was still properly bonkers. Not in a cute, funny, “Oh, isn’t she so bonkers,” way but in a grief filled, PTSD suffering, suicidally depressed kind of way. I was clinging on by my fingernails and most of them were spit and flaky. My brain was actually broken. Instinctively, I knew the things I needed to do: walking, talking (a little), making the most of silence, reading, eating well and drinking lots of water. Funnily enough I read an article yesterday about brain health ant they were exactly the things they recommended. Brain Health
These needs led me to decide to combine two of them for my challenge. I decided to walk everywhere (which also had the bonus of cutting out the opportunities for the crushing claustrophobic related anxiety) and reading.

I thought about how I would assess my progress. Twelve books in the year seemed a reasonable number and I should read a lot of each while walking. This should be without falling over, walking into anyone or anything, getting run over, killing myself or anyone else. If I could manage that, I decided, then I could call myself an expert.

Nobody wrote my challenge down on my performance management or put my picture on a school display. I think they thought I was joking. However, I am an All Trades Master of None and I never joke about collecting shiny new skills.

Well? You are asking. Did I do it?

Of course I did and it has been brilliant. I’m still alive, I didn’t walk into anything (not when I was reading - although I have got a nasty bruise from walking into the mine at the prom - “A minor injury said the Long Suffering Husband, although he is now saying, “it looks like it’s exploded). I have never fallen over and I have read loads more books than I would have.

These are the books, if you want to give it a go, although I’m sure it would work with any book.
1. The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
2.  Japan Travel Guide - Yuki Fukuyama
3. What Lies Beneath - Dr Sue Black
5. Dear Mrs Bird - AJ Pearce
6. A Dog’s Purpose - W Bruce Cameron
7. Nella Last’s  Peace (Post War Diaries) - Ed Robert Malcomson
8. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy
9. Milkman - Anna Burns
10. Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Hardcastle
11. Our Hidden Lives - Simon Garfield
12. Daisy’s Vintage Cornish Camper Van - Ali McNamara
13. Fierce Fairytales: Poems to stir your soul - Nikita Gill
14. The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred Year Old Man - Jonas Jonasson
15. Normal People - Sally Rooney
16. The Travelling Cat Chronicles - Hiroshima Arikawa
17 . You Will Be Safe Here - Damien Barr
18. Invisible Women - Caroline Credo Perez
19. Lowborn - Kelly Hudson
20. Spring - Ali Smith
21. The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes - Ruth Hogan
22. All Among the Barley - Melissa Harrison
23. The Strawberry Thief - Joanne Harris
24. Middle England - Jonathan Coe (should finish tomorrow)

I doubled my target and it’s not even a full year yet. There are some really great books on that list and I also have fond memories of where I was walking when I read some of them: You Will Be Safe Here might have been set in South Africa but for me it is also set in Tokyo.

Tomorrow I will tell you what other people think of my expertise.

Expert in a Year

The school I work in has been doing a thing this year that they call ‘expert in a year.’ The title makes me twitch a bit because I’ve spent nearly fifty years working at playing the flute and still can’t call myself an expert. However, I’ve loved it.

We have been talking a lot about the growth mindset concept, which is the idea that you shouldn’t be a quitter and should be open to new ideas. Musicians know a thing or two about this. We call it practice. In the original YouTube clip I think the chap got better at table tennis. He seemed to play all day every day and also had expert tuition. Obviously, these options weren’t available to us - we all still had to come to school for a start, so our expectations of what we could hope to achieve
 had to be lower. Both staff and pupils set themselves challenges at the beginning of the school year. Some went public, others kept their ideas to themselves and a few more refused to be an expert in anything other than to continue to be a good teacher/pupil/human being (which is enough really).

I have thoroughly enjoyed watching people both succeed and fail. I think we learn as much from failure as we do from success. If you have an injury that stops you competing in the Badminton Horse  Trials then no amount of positive thinking or Growth Mindset will help you. If you have forgotten that the Badminton Horse Trials were in May and already oversubscribed and you have only managed a rising trot once before falling off then you probably set your sights too high.

I have particularly enjoyed watching people take on this challenge because many chose music. Lots of the children wanted to start playing an instrument or get better at one they already played, although it wasn’t just children. Some staff chose to learn an instrument. I could help the flute players and am pleased to say that they have all made progress, with one adult going from not being able to blow a note to passing her grade 1 exam with a distinction.

You are probably wondering if I set myself a challenge or just sat back and watched everyone else. Well, I’m not an All Trades Master of None for nothing. I’m always setting new challenges. I had already started a photography course to get better at using my camera, so didn’t feel I could use that one, so I decided to become an expert in reading and walking. More about that tomorrow

Invisible Women

Men in Labour can’t see women.

A bold statement, I know, but it explains so much, including why all the women who ran for the leadership were overlooked in favour of Jeremy  Corbyn. It wasn’t malicious; they just couldn’t be seen. Obviously, it might not just be the men of the Labour Party to whom women are invisible, which would explain why you’ve heard of Watson and Crick but not Rosalind Franklin. Obviously, she was there identifying the structure of DNA but no one could see her.

I stumbled upon this revelation on Twitter this morning when I saw that both Alastair Campbell and David Lammy had retweeted James Cleverly’s photo of Boris Johnson at hustings in Essex, with a quote about women not being allowed.

It was clearly a dog whistle to stir up some anger but it was ridiculous. If they had commented on the lack of undercthirties or the predominance of white skin they might have had a point. People noticed how silly it was but even men who could see women struggled to see all of them.

I’m currently reading (dipping in and out of) Invisible Women by Caroline Credo Perez, which is a book about how women aren’t included in data and how the world assumes a human is a man. I’m sure when she started to study the phenomenon she didn’t reealise that women were actually invisible.

However, invisibility is a superpower. We just need to learn how to use it wisely.

Four Concerts and a Funeral

It’s been a busy week.

Pupils have taken practical exams, I’ve been to a funeral (the Long Suffering Husband has been to two), I’ve had several concerts, the school play has had its run of three shows and tonight is our orchestra end of year concert and party. In my spare time I’ve made 6 cakes for the refreshment table,  printed music, made a huge vegetarian curry, organised music and planned lessons that can happen outside (because my music room has taken on its bi-annual role of storage cupboard).

If I were Richard Curtis I’d write something witty and profound about this situation but I’m not so you’ll probably just find me rocking in a corner somewhere.

Add to the mix the weather and you’ve got very  sweaty concert experiences, heatstroke in outdoor lessons, difficulty sleeping and cramp. Last night, I fell asleep biting my lip and woke up at 3am thinking, “at least I’m only conducting tomorrow and don’t have to play the flute,” before remembering the quartet we’ve put into the programme, which suddenly reminded me that I’m playing the piano for the soloist. Suddenly, the room feels even hotter.

It will be fine, though. Better than fine. These things are always worth it. The joy of a performance, even when everything seems to go wrong, is unbeatable.

I am getting on a bit now, though and I worry that it’s beginning to show. I was told so in a class lesson, where I had taken the children outside to bounce tennis balls to my made up song.”
We sang, “Brave Grace Darling. Lived in a lighthouse. SS Forefarshire crashed on the rocks. How  many survivors did she save?” Then we bounced balls and caught them to find the answer. Six year olds aren’t great at bouncing at catching balls, so not many of them managed to save as many as Grace did (9), except one or two very talented children who saved a ‘billion squillion’. When I was bouncing the ball a little group of children watched. I’d got up to 89 survivors before one little girl gasped and said, “Wow, you’re really old and you can still count really good!”

At the end of one of the school plays the headteacher gave his speech about how hard everyone had  worked. Headteachers are required to do this by law but there is no training and at the end of term they are exhausted. If you don’t work in a school and just watch these productions then you probably have no idea how many lunch breaks are given up to persuade the children to project, understand a funny line, dance, put themselves out of their comfort zone and make props. Thanking all these efforts is a very tricky job to do because it’s too easy to forget someone, or imply that one of your teachers is old or stressed.  This year our headteacher was particularly emotional, as our kids had managed the trick of singing like angels in the last song to make everyone cry and so he stumbled a little over his words. He thanked me for working, “tiredly....tire....tirelessly” to get the children to sing well. He may have a point. I will certainly be working tiredly today.

 I’d love you to come and watch me working tiredly with my orchestra, so if you fancy some free Summer music and cake please come along.

I Love a Funeral

I know this marks me out as even weirder than you thought I was but I love a funeral.

It’s the perfect party for the socially awkward with a death obsession, who finds the conversation of older people to be creatively stimulating. I would never go to a party unless I had a book in my bag but at a wake you can actually read the book and people forgive you because funeral grief makes social anxiety acceptable. It’s the party where everyone feels like I do. They loiter uncomfortably at the edges of the room, finding unfunny things hilarious. They take food because they think they ought, rather than because they are actually hungry or they eat their body weight in crisps and cake because it keeps them busy. They listen surreptitiously to conversations, so they can pretend they know who people are because they aren’t brazen enough to just call everyone “poppet” and be done with it. And if it all gets to much they can nip off to the loo for a quick cry.

I was a little concerned that my first funeral since my parents would be tricky. I’ve often noticed that people can be overly emotional at funerals where they have little connection to the deceased because they are actually grieving for someone else. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to support my friend, which I hope I did even though I welcomed her and her sister into the ‘dead dad club’ with the words, “It’s a shit club to be in but you’ve got to take what you’re given.”

I needn’t have worried about misplaced grief bubbling over because I don’t do that. The closest I get to emotion in public is laughter. I love learning about the person that has died. I like hearing people’s stories of them and feeling the pride they have to have known that person. As the party wears on and people start to talk about other things and old men tease each other about their choice of tie or offer to fight me over whether the cream or the jam goes on the scone first, there is always a feeling of happy ease. This is all people have to think about. It’s the missing loved one or trivialities. No one is stressing about the school play, the 50 emails that haven’t been sent or the looming redundancy. Then at 5.30 all the old people wander off for nap time/pill time/Pointless (not my observation but I’m going to remember it to see if it happens at other funerals) and the party starts to break up. After my Dad’s funeral at this point the party continued at Mum’s house where her friends ate cake and drank Prosecco and at Mum’s the drunks all stayed in the garden until it was very dark singing Oasis songs. I think the after party of a wake is where the immediate relatives can let their hair down and have fun.

It’s the day after a funeral that’s hard. Normal life is meant to continue but in normal life people aren’t openly grieving and you can’t talk about death. The day after my parents funerals I was fit for nothing. It was a day for eating crisps and chocolate and watching The Princess Bride. I was surprised at how awful I felt, especially as people go back to work the day after an important funeral. It’s the day after the funeral that you begin to wonder if it will ever feel real.