About the P word

There is no word in the English language more frustrating than 'practice' or 'practise'.

There you go, with problem number one.  There are not many words in English that mean the same thing but are spelt differently depending on whether they are are a verb or a noun.  If we were Spanish or German we would be used to this sort of thing but we're not.  The rule, as I understand it, is that if it's a verb (a doing-word to those, like me, who never did any grammar after primary school) it has an S but if it is a noun then you use a C.  So you say, "I going to practise the piano." or "I am going to do my piano practice." Grammatical pedants get very upset if you get it wrong.  It can be seen as a huge crime.  Someone I know was laughingly telling me about when she was being a supply teacher last week and the class teacher had left her a note, which said, "Please get the children to practice their spellings."  She told me that she left her a note back, which said, "Practise your spellings - a verb - maybe you should practise yours."  Now, I like good grammar but I also like good manners and I thought that was a little rude.  I wonder if she will ever be asked to do supply for that teacher again?
Also, if you are American it doesn't matter.  It's always practice. It has taken me a good year to convince my computer that the word practise does exist and not automatically spell-correct it for me.

The second problem with practice is that it is just frustrating. Sometimes, no matter how hard or how often you practise nothing seems to improve.  I find piano practice particularly frustrating. I practise until my fingers ache and .....well, and nothing.

Practice is boring.  You do the same thing over and over again.  Then you do it again.  And then you give it another go.  W.E. Hickson is credited with inventing the proverb, "If at first you don't succeed, try try and try again."    He knew about practice, as he was a singer who wrote the 'improved version of the National Anthem.  I think I prefer W.C. Field's version, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again and then quit.  There's no point being a damn fool about it."

Today I decided to have a day off and do no practice. I read a book, sat on the sofa, and watched the GBBO master classes. Then I had this stupid idea that I would be able to make the 8-plaited loaf, if I practised it.

I suppose it's a little better but I want it to be PERFECT!

And there's another P-word!

The Four Week Blues

It's now a recognised phenomena.  Four weeks after moving away to University students get a bit sad and miserable.  They call it the 4 week blues.

My daughter tweeted that she was feeling homesick for the first time today.  Her friend tweeted, "Who's with me? #OperationBeat4WeekBlues."  I'm with them and so this blog is dedicated to this cause.

Although, there is a lot I don't remember about my college days (I am very old and an awful lot of alcohol was consumed) I have a vague recollection of feeling miserable just before Halloween.

There are several things that could cause these 'blues'.

It might be homesickness, when you suddenly realise that you have actually sort-of left home.  No matter how excited you were to go, or how sick of your over-fussing Mum or nagging Dad after a while you do start to miss it.  You can't just have a 'Mummy hug' when you need one, there is no one to cook your dinner or wash your sheets.  The everyday drudgery of just living seems like too much to cope with all on your own.  

Then again, it might just be your liver having a major protest.  "No, help!  Please!  No more!  The 2 weeks in Falaraki was OK but then I had a rest.  Please can we just have orange juice tonight?"

The blues might be caused by the weather.  Let's be honest, 4 weeks after most students start University, summer is finally over.  We are currently experiencing levels of mizzle (mist and drizzle)  that make your hair go curly and stop it from getting properly light all day.  Any moment now, it's going to get really cold and only the hardy Northerners and true Essex Girls will be able to go out in a belt, t-shirt and sandals.  It might be SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) due to the lack of light.

It could also be a nutritional issue.  For the first time you are feeding yourself and the 7th Pot Noodle, Jacket Potato or Pasta with Pesto of the week may not be filling all of your nutritional needs.  Lack of B vitamins, Vitamin C, Magnesium, Calcium, Potassium  Iron, Manganese and Zinc all can lead to depression.  

And finally, there's the work.  Suddenly you realise what you came to University for.  It wasn't the parties, the drinking or the making of dubious food.  It was to get a degree and that means work - hard work - and lots of it.  Not the kind of work you did in the sixth form, where you got your teachers notes onto your page without it passing through either of your brains.  No, this is proper thinking.  You have to read books and use your brain.  Scary stuff!

But what can you do to beat the blues?

The first thing to know is that you're not alone.  Everyone's just a bit miserable.  Everyone hates the weather.  Everyone finds the work hard.  Everyone has drunk too much.  Everyone is eating badly.  Everyone is fed up of doing their own washing (especially your parents - who have been doing it for much longer and have been doing yours too!)  So, talk to each other.  Don't hide away and be gloomy.

Get out.  Get some exercise.  Join the gym, go for a swim, run to the supermarket.

Eat well, try to get as many colours on your plate as possible.  Eat some food that makes you feel happy.  Marmite, chocolate, fish oil, nuts, oats and Spinach.  Comfort food isn't called that by chance - eat some.  My favourite is my own invention - a Snickers Sandwich: Wholemeal bread(B Vitamins), spread on one half with crunch peanut butter and Nutella on the other.  To my daughter's friend who tweeted about whether it would be rude to take Porridge into a lecture  I say it would be rude not to.  Porridge is fantastic for the blues - just ask the 3 Bears.

Sing. (There is nothing else to say about this - singing cures everything!)

When my daughter was very little she used to ask for coloured hugs.  She would say, "Can I have a Pink Cuddle?"  I would think pink as I hugged her and it seemed to work.  It wasn't always pink.  Sometimes it was green, blue, purple or yellow.  I don't ever remember her asking for a red or brown cuddle.  Thinking back to this I wonder if surrounding yourself with the right colours might also be important.  There is an interesting article in Psychology Today about colour and Depression http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mindfulness-approach/200912/what-color-is-your-depression-overcoming-depression-mindfulness

Meditation and mindfulness might seem too tricky but there's nothing wrong with wearing bright colours or just thinking pink.

What shouldn't you do

My first reaction when my daughter tweeted about homesickness was to think she might come home or that I should go up and see her.  (The four week blues hits us parents too - although the permanently tidy bedroom, the amount of time saved in not having to be a taxi and the fact that we can eat meat all the time do make it easier) .  It would be a mistake though.  Any sadness is normal and we can all get through it.

As

Delusional

Training to be an Homeopath was one of the most interesting things I've ever done.  Homeopathy is a fascinating subject and to me always felt more scientific than conventional medicine.  Each medicine is given on the principle of like curing like and the symptoms of what it can cure are found by healthy human volunteers taking the medicine until symptoms start to appear (proving)

Practising Homeopathy was a completely different matter.  Helping people was wonderful but trying to make a living from something that was (and still is) so vehemently ridiculed was very hard.  When I stopped practising I thought I would keep using it for acute illnesses and for a while I did.  But the one thing that Homeopathy taught me was that most things get better on their own.  When things don't get better then I do go back to the homeopathy but after seven years I'm just a little rusty.  The fact that sometimes the first remedy works and other times it takes 2 or 3 goes to get it right and other times nothing works and you just have to wait for your body to do it's own thing, makes me think it can't just be placebo.

For the last month I've been feeling a bit under the weather and after a child asked me if I was sure my cough was 'just a cough' I thought it was time to get the homeopathy books out again.  Because many remedies were 'proved' in Victorian times some things are quite hilarious.  I always enjoyed the delusion section.  In today's modern world delusions are symptoms that are only confessed by the clinically insane.  Most of us pretend not to have thoughts that don't match reality but we all do.

There are 18 pages of delusions in the book I'm looking at and they even have their own chapter.  There are some delusions I would really like to have;  Delusion she is beautiful, Delusion of fancies (I'd quite like a French Fancy), Delusion he cannot hear (could be quite useful during recorder lessons), Delusions he is a bottle of soda water (sounds fun - fizzy!), Delusion that she is surrounded by friends.   There are some that I can't even begin to imagine; Delusion corners of houses seem projected so that he fears he will run against them while walking in the street, Delusion that persons are furniture, Delusion mistook her friend for a Mandarin, Delusion fancies he is commanded to fall on his knees and confess his sins and rip up his bowels by a mushroom.

Sometimes what you think is a delusion turns out to be true.

These are my current delusions

1. I might have gone deaf (it's very quiet in this house)
2. I feel a little bit alone.
3.  My daughter is living with Halle Berry
4.  I am capable of being objective about my own symptoms (A visit to my homeopath is looking likely)
5.  I have only been coughing for a few weeks (The Long Suffering Husband says it's been 7 years but that might be his delusion)
6. I can eat unlimited amounts of cake and not get fat.
7.  I have a delusion that my kitchen is on fire and I can smell burning plastic..........

OH WAIT..............................

THAT'S NOT A DELUSION!

Do You Knead the Dough?

Every time I bake bread variations of the old panto joke, "Do you knead the Dough?" "Of course I need the dough, I'm skint." run through my head.  I have a bread machine so this doesn't happen very often but it should as  making bread by hand is very therapeutic.

In honour of tomorrow's Great British Bake Off final I decided to set myself a technical challenge from my new birthday present and try Paul Hollywood's 8 Plaited Loaf.  Trying these technical challenges make me respect the candidates even more.

The recipe says to knead the dough for at least 10 minutes.  That's a long time.  Long enough to make your arms really ache but if you think about people who have really annoyed you it's extremely good for your mental health and also helps to get the dirt out from under your fingernails (only joking)

My favourite part is after the dough has risen and you get to punch it in the face.  The book calls it 'knocking it back' but let's be honest we all have someone we'd just love to punch in the face but never would.

I followed the instructions carefully, weighed out the dough to 8 equal pieces and rolled them to the same length.

Then it was time to plait.  Now, I should have known I wouldn't be very good at this.  My daughter never was the child with beautifully plaited hair, in fact I often struggled to just get it in bunches.  It wasn't difficult to follow the numbers but it didn't seem to be as even as it should have been.

It baked beautifully and has a nice firm bottom.  It also tastes great but looks nothing like the picture in the book.

A friend asked me, "What are we going to do after Tuesday, when the Bake Off is finished?"  

I might watch the Danish Bake Off (which I think is online somewhere).  I might do some more baking but I won't be applying for the next series.

Charity Begins at Home

Charles Dickens wrote, in Martin Chuzzlewit, that, "Charity begins at home and justice begins next door."   As I haven't read Martin Chuzzlewit I have no idea if Dickens meant this to be a good or a bad thing.  In fact, I haven't read any Dickens since I was about 12 and can't remember much of what I read then, except that Dickens believed in Charity.  He lived in Victorian England, where the poor were literally starving and he knew that people needed help.  I did read Bleak House and remember that Mrs Jellybelly (I think that was her name) was more worried about the little black babies than she was about looking after her own children and I'm sure as 'Charity' became popular people did jump on band wagons, rather than look at what they could do in their own neighbourhood.  Many of the big Charities we still support today have their roots in Victorian England; Barnardos, Save the Children and the Children's Society.  Victorian England also started welfare reform and allowed everyone to become philanthropists  through income tax.

Some people are very much against helping others.  There is a man at the allotment who is always telling my mum about people (usually single women)  who don't work who get everything, 'paid by OUR TAXES.'  My mum tells him that she didn't mind that.  That she would much rather pay something than see unmarried women live on the streets with their children! 

There seem to be so many Charities and so many events it's often difficult to know which to support.  Our Youth Orchestra is a registered Charity because it's the only way we can keep the whole of our £1 a week per person subscription to run the orchestra and apply for grants like lottery funding to buy big items like Timpani.  Every week there is a new sponsorship form on the staff room table from someone who is walking, running, cycling or just sitting in a bath of baked beans.  There are so many awareness days that this month sees Breast Cancer Awareness jostling for attention with Blindness Awareness,  Jeans for Genes, Hospice Day, World Arthritis Day, Child Poverty Day and many more including Chocolate week and Bramley Apple Pie week.

Yesterday, I went to an event to support the Juvenille Diabetes Research Foundation.  If I'm honest I wasn't looking forward to it.  Not because I didn't want to support the charity but because I'm a grumpy old woman who doesn't really like to go out on a Saturday night, especially to somewhere where there will be lots of children that I teach.  A band called the Whoppers, who weren't bad at all played a mixture of songs, mainly from my teenage years.  They had a very strange sign, which no one I asked seemed to understand. 

It was a great evening, full of fun and it raised £600 for the Charity and the raffle was fabulous.  They had worked so hard to get loads of brilliant prizes and we  won three.  Now, normally, I would have put prizes back in after the first one, but there were easily enough prizes for everyone who was there.  

JDRF is a charity that deserves support.  It is a medical charity that is working to find a cure for type 1 Diabetes.  Type 1 diabetes is a chronic, life-threatening condition.  It is an auto-immune system condition and is not related to diet or exercise.  It develops when the body's own immune system attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells in the pancreas.  It reduces life expectancy by about 20 years and is the leading cause of blindness and limb amputations (not caused by trauma) in working-age adults.  The risk of stroke and heart disease is five times greater with this condition and it is not something that people get better from.  Suffers would die if they didn't test regularly and inject themselves with insulin approximately 5 or 6 times a day.  This disease doesn't seem fair.  The charity are funding research into stopping or reversing the immune response that causes type 1 diabetes, triggering the body to grow new insulin producing cells, treatments and therapies to combat the complications of the disease and ways to control the condition, such as an artificial pancreas.  

The event I went to was organised by the parents of a wonderful girl that I am lucky enough to teach.  She suddenly fell ill a few years ago at Christmas time and copes brilliantly with the injections and monitoring her food intake.  Her mother and Aunt are going to run the London Marathon later in the year to raise even more funds for the charity and when they do I will add a link to their just giving page but in the meantime more information can be found about JDRF on their website www.jdrf.org.uk

You Know You're Getting Old...

Hashtag - '# you know you're getting old when' is trending on twitter.  Clearly, you know you're getting old when you don't know about hashtags and twitter and as they have prompted me to write this blog I'm obviously not getting old.

The statements people are making make me feel old.  Someone put, "You know you're getting old when you fall asleep on the couch and wake up on the couch," makes me think that this person is only just over 11.  I don't know any adult who gets carried up to bed.  Another, "You know you're getting old when the Disney Channel doesn't show anything you used to watch," again must be from a child.  Maybe it would be more appropriate to say, "You know you're getting old when you didn't realise there was a Disney Channel."

These are mine.

1.  You know you're getting old when you get told by your daughter not to tweet her friends.
2.  You know you're getting old when you work with people that could be your children
3.  You know you're getting old when you ache - EVERYWHERE - ALL THE TIME
4.  You know you're getting old when you don't fall asleep during Question Time.
5.  You know you're getting old when Tena Lady is you're new best friend.
6.  You know you're getting old when a child in your class absent-mindedly calls you 'Nanny'
7.  You know you're getting old when you laugh at jokes you've heard hundreds of times before just because you need to laugh at something.
8.  You know you're getting old when you're boobs rest on your belly (I think this works for men too)
9.  You know you're getting old when you can't find your keys and your family suggest you check the fridge.
10.  You know you're getting old when a late night out is going to watch a film that starts after 7pm.
11. You know you're getting old when you hear yourself saying the things you parents said to you when you were a 'grown up teenager'.  Things like, "When you get a house of your own I'm going to come round and leave all the lights on!"
12.  You know you're getting old when you get excited about a notebook as a birthday present. (It's a lovely notebook - thanks mum - and has jokes about weeds!)
13.  You know you're getting old when jokes about weeds are your favourite.
14.  You know you're getting old when you want to tell children off in the supermarket.
15.  You know you're getting old when you have an early night and both sit in bed with your reading glasses on.
16.  You know you're getting old when you can list 15 things in a few seconds without pausing for breath.

But one of the tweets said, "you know you're getting old when you can't remember the last time you played wink murder," so the wonderful thing is teachers can't be old until after retirement no matter how old we might feel.

Life is hard for us Librans - or maybe it's not.

All the best people are born in October but let's be honest, we're not great decision makers.  It can take my friend and I (whose birthdays neatly sandwich David Cameron's) weeks to decide on a date when we can go out for a meal.  "I don't mind.  What do you think?" It's supposed to be a trait of those born under the sign of Libra that we can see all sides and therefore find it difficult to make a decision.

Too often, I see all sides and just end up feeling confused.  I'm quite confused about the whole Jimmy Saville thing.  I'm confused that it seems to have been a surprise.  I always thought he was a dirty old man and I think there were lots of dirty old men around when I was growing up.  Old men seemed to like young girls.  There were girls in my year at school who were thrilled to have 28 year old boyfriends, who would pick them up from school in their cars.  I think that they were just dirty old men.  These days they would be described as predatory paedophiles.  I think that's a good thing because it would stop girls thinking they were wonderful.  Or would it?  Do girls still go all giddy at the thought of being bought a drink, or nice things by a bloke with a car?  They probably do.  The girls that had 28 year old boyfriends weren't stroppy feminists like me.  They just wanted someone to love them.

When I was at University a teacher made me feel very uncomfortable.  He made jokes and told me I was beautiful and that I reminded him of his wife when she was younger.  Nothing wrong with that.  He was just being friendly, right?  My personal tutor told me I should be flattered.  He said that I must be talented because no lecturer would make a pass at a less than able student just in case they were accused of giving higher grades for sex.  "SEX? Who mentioned sex?  I just said he made me feel uncomfortable.!"  A few months later, another girl was dating him and she was very pleased with herself.  We were over age.  He hadn't done anything wrong but I think he was a dirty old man.

Another dirty old man interviewed me for a job once.  He locked his door after he showed me in and then he pointed at a chair on the other side of the room and asked me to put all my clothes in it.  Being blessed with a healthy dose of logic I just sat in the other chair.  I did wonder what other candidates had done.  He said, "No one has ever got that as quickly as you did," and I swear he looked disappointed but maybe he was just looking for the most logical candidates.

I'm glad the world has changed.  I'm glad Benny Hill shows aren't on the television any more.  I'm glad we think there is more to women than how they look or the size of their breasts.  But the world hasn't changed much.  We still have page 3 and despite a campaign to get it removed from the Sun it is women who are standing up and saying that it's a woman's right to expose herself and earn loads of money for it.  An ex- page 3 model on the TV said, "Children don't see breasts as something sexual.  It's perfectly natural.  When I get out of the bath my children don't think anything."  Unfortunately, I've never seen a picture of a woman just getting out of a bath on page three.  I think they are normally sticking their tongue out, playing with the elastic of their knickers and flicking their hair.  There  is usually a news in briefs piece next to it, implying that the young woman is too stupid to really have any true opinion on the news.

So maybe, I'm not very confused about these issues. I want women to be free to say, "No," to dirty old men.  I want them to feel as though they are enough without these men.  I want men to enjoy an equal companionship with women.  I want women to be in school in every country in the land.  I want people to support tomorrow's 'Day of the Girl Child.' and I'm going to sign the petition to remove boobs from page 3.
Petition against page 3 of the Sun

Happy Birthday,,,,,,,again!

Not again!  Do I have to have another one?

  It only seems 5 minutes ago that it was my last birthday. We were looking around De Montfort University and I was feeling very spoilt with a box of Maltesers, the British Bake Off Book, a novel and a handbag.  I was weighing up the dilemma of whether to reply to all the Happy Birthdays on my Facebook page, just 'like' them or ignore them completely.

Well, nothing has changed.  I'm still 42;  a number I chose to stick at being a huge fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  I still feel very spoilt.  I got a box of Maltesers, the British Bake Off Book and a novel.  I also got a sewing machine, which I will tell you more about in a minute and a book of Leicester Football Club Trivia.  Yesterday, I went to De Montfort University, to drop my daughter back home (and it's wonderful that she's settled in so well that she does feel like it's home).  I'm also having the annual Facebook dilemma and so everything is the same.  Life just goes round in ever decreasing circles.

The only thing that's different is that I'm even more grumpy than I was last year.  The poor Long Suffering Husband couldn't do anything right this weekend.  He pointed out a bit of "seventeen year old dirt" on the banisters and I slammed the door, taking the dog for a long walk.

I sort of hate having a birthday.  I love other people's birthdays.  I like choosing cards and presents, making cakes planning treats but when it's my own there just seems to be so much pressure.  The LSH spent the weekend grinning and singing, "Happy Birthday to you for tomorrow....the day after tomorrow....etc.," Unfortunately, every time he did I just wanted to hide.  The thought of getting into bed and pulling the duvet over my head and shouting, "Come and get me when it's all over," was really appealing.

About a month ago, the Long Suffering Husband said, "What do you want for your birthday, this year?"  "You know what, I think I'd like a sewing machine,"  I replied.  I even showed him a sewing machine that I thought would be good and it wasn't too expensive. A few weeks later he asked me again and I was suspicious that it wasn't the present he wanted to buy.  I'm not completely insensitive and thought it might be because my current sewing machine belonged to his mum and we inherited it when she died. This machine has been playing up for a while, the tension slipped as you sew and I had been to find out about repairs, which would cost more than a new machine.  I hadn't told him this because I didn't think he'd be very interested.  The "What do you want for your birthday?" had started to become more desperate sounding, "Have you decided what to do about your birthday, yet?" and the he downloaded the instruction manual for his mum's machine for me.  She got it in 1972 and although it didn't solve the problem of the slipping tension, I have now got a pattern for a fabulous bat-wing dress.  And maybe being grumpy works because I also have a new sewing machine and the poor LSH is under no illusion as to what I think of his attempts to get me to fix the old machine.

Luckily, I've shared my horrible cold with my son and so today will be a duvet day, feeling sorry for ourselves, going round in circles, repeating the same old patterns.

National Poetry Day

For National Poetry Day I'm going to share some of my favourite poems:

The Mechanical Crane

The mechanical crane 

Said: 'I've got a pain

At the spot where my girders join.

When I'm picking up bricks 

My wiring plays tricks,

And my chain makes a rather weird BOING.

'I've grown ever so tall

But I'm not well at all

And lifting is making me thin.

Though I'm fifty feet high

And my head scrapes the sky

I'd much rather be home in a tin.'

(From A bedtime story book - November 6th)

Loss

The day he moved out was terrible -

That evening she went through hell.

His absence wasn't a problem

But the corkscrew had gone as well

(Wendy Cope - Serious Concerns)

A Silly Poem

Said Hamlet to Ophelia

I'll draw a sketch of thee

What kind of pencil shall I use?

2B or not 2B?

(Spike Milligan)

Eccentric Grandparents.

By the time you become a teenager, even the most normal of grandparents suddenly become 'eccentric'.  You start to notice their little ways and think them just a little weird.  That fact that they sing, "Kay Rose sat on a pin, Kay Rose rose again," every time they see you and your sister has stopped being cute and is now just odd.  Constantly being on a diet but dipping into a bag of toffees every 5 seconds suddenly seems ridiculous, as does making pictures out of sequins, having dolls in Crinoline dress cover the toilet rolls and resting a cup of tea on an over-abundant cleavage (and that was just my Grandad!).

They sell these on e-bay!

Having an eccentric grandparent is the stuff of novels and anyone who writes seems to have been blessed with at least one. On holiday in Wales this year, I overheard two groups of teenagers discussing their eccentric grandparents.  It took me a while to realise that they were cousins because the old people in question were the same.  They lived on a farm in Bulkinton (somewhere near Wiltshire, I think) and living on a farm seems to be a criteria for novelists eccentric grandparents.  Their Grandfather, or Pompah, as they called him, had a study, stuffed head to toe with books and papers and shelves with jars of preserved animals and an old gramophone player with a handle.  He would put on some 'raucous classical stuff' and make the children march around his study keeping time. (I really warmed to this man).  He was a great advocate of 'free food' and would eat road kill  berries, wild mushrooms from the wood near where they lived and pickled pigeons feet, which he also made the children try. He owned a gun, which he had never fired but grandma had, the time when she shot a stranger coming up the farm path.

The book I'm reading at the moment features an eccentric grandmother, who invites her children over to put post-it notes on the things they would like when she dies.  Being very posh, also seems to help eccentricity.  This grandmother and I have something in common, though.  In her house she has a 'red', 'blue' and 'yellow' bedroom that the author (her grandson) assumes must have once been painted that colour because they weren't now.  In our house we have a 'green room'.  It's not painted green, nor has it ever been.  It's not a terribly pretentious theatre reference either.  It's not a waiting room.  It's just our spare bedroom but we've called it the 'green room' for at least 15 years.  It contains the ironing board, iron, a TV, some bags that are waiting to go in the loft, a fan and a clothes horse (I mean an exercise bike).  We put the washing that is waiting to be ironed in there.  When someone shouts, "Mum, have you seen my PE kit?" the reply is always, "Have you looked in the green room?"  I have been trying to remember why we called it the green room and I think I've finally got it.  It used to be my son's room and his current room (which was the spare room) was painted green.  If I keep this fact quiet, keep making things out of courgettes, make children march in time, say, "Oh, I say," a lot then I think with practise I could become an eccentric grandmother and be an inspiration to future generations who might, one day want to write a novel - or am I thinking too far ahead?