The squirrels are taking over

A few weeks ago I bought a new notebook.

It made me laugh but since then I have been noticing squirrels everywhere and I'm beginning to think that they are planning a takeover in time for Christmas.

We should have realised when that squirrel flashed us all on Bake Off a few years ago. 

Since then, they have been keeping an eye on our television and want a part of it. Squirrels love nuts and TV is full of them. They have been in training, readying themselves for the moment of take over.

Picture: Twitter@Cathymorin19

A few brave squirrel soldiers have already mounted an advance attack, preparing the way for take over day. A few weeks ago I saw a squirrel jump out of a tree on a fellow dog walker and only last week my dog sniffed a squirrel. Now, that's just not right, is it? Dogs chase squirrels because squirrels run away. They do not stand their ground on the path looking cute and fluffy, leaving the poor dog no option but to have a sniff and move on.

A squirrel in Watford has been terrorising a school http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/ and squirrels have been jumping out of Christmas trees.

I can't help thinking that you deserve to have a squirrel jump out of your tree if you put it up this early. Social media has been full of Christmas trees this weekend and although I do love Christmas I can't help thinking that it's all much too early.

This is what your tree will look like by Christmas if you put it up now!

I was beginning to despair of Twitter because of all the Christmas trees, when I came across this exchange and realised just how much I love it.

Oh Janice!

Then a sinister twist occurred and Janice was bombarded with Kirsty Allsop's followers' pictures of Christmas trees complete with crocheted robins. I bet there weren't just robins but squirrels too and some of those squirrels will have been real, sitting in those trees, waiting for takeover day!

Music Teacher Madness

The music teacher was easily bored.  She had never managed to stick to anything for very long and was reaching the dangerous stage where she had been in her current job as long as any other. Another Christmas Nativity, another afternoon of carol singing outside the local supermarket and another lesson observation loomed and it all seemed very familiar.  "I need more excitement in my life," she stupidly thought, "I know,  I'll enter the choir for a national competition."

The choir were excited and most of them learnt their words and sang tunefully, harmonising with each other. They watched the previous winners on YouTube and were keen to start adding choreography.  The music teacher reminded them that they had to get the singing right first as the initial round was judged from a recording.  If they got through to the final then they could add dance-moves.

The time came to record their entry.  A quarter of the choir were absent and the recording was terrible.  The music teacher put her head in her hands and cried.  "We probably won't get through to the final," she said, "but I would like it if we sent in a recording that shows what we can actually do."  The children disagreed.  Not only were they going to get to the final but they were going to win the whole thing and they said it should be recorded again - maybe in school time when everyone would be there.

The music teacher agreed to go in on her day off to re-record their entry.  "Yes!" she thought, "that shows what they can do!"  She went home and burnt the recording onto a CD, printed off an entry form filled it in and popped it an an envelope before teaching her evening flute pupils.

One of the flute pupils was also in the choir.  "Is that it?" she asked, pointing at the envelope.
"Yes"
"I think we should record it again because it could be better and you should ask Petunia not to come because she can't sing in tune."
"Oh no!  It's good enough.  It shows what we can do at the moment.  We want to be better if we get to the final."
"When we get to the final."
"We might not."
"How many schools will enter?"
"I don't know"
"How many places are there?"
"I don't know"
"What if there are 6 places and only 5 choirs in the final?  Then we will know that we only got in because not many entered."
"That's a point.  The competition will be quite tough though because music teachers wouldn't enter their choir unless they thought they were pretty good."
"That's good!  We'll definitely get through then because there won't be many entries."
The music teacher began to shake, her stomach was doing back-flips. She wondered what she had been thinking.
"Are you alright, Miss?  You look a bit sick."
"Oh, errm, well.  It's just that it's a bit scary isn't it?"
"No.  Why?"
"Well, if we do get through the other choirs might be really good."
"Probably, they'll be all those private schools with their proper music teachers who really know what they're doing."
The music teacher laughed and felt better.
She walked the dog round to the postbox and there was no turning back.

A strange e-mail appeared in the music teacher's in-box.
"Dear Music teacher who doesn't really know what she's doing,

Guess what?  You're through.  We don't know how, it must be some kind of fluke. We were hoping that there would be lots of private schools with 'proper' music teachers entering but it seems that you are the only one. Please present yourself and your choir at the Barbican immediately."

The music teacher finished applying superglue to the bottom of Maude's feet and turned round to see thousands of clowns in an audience, all sitting on red velour seats.  They were noisily eating popcorn and throwing sweet wrappers around.  She recognised some of the clowns as people that she worked with and parents of the children in her choir.  She turned and looked at her choir and they all laughed.  She raised her hands to start the song and they shook.
"Does she have Parkinson's?" one of the clowns shouted
"I don't know but she could have put some clothes on," replied another.

Friendly Enough

Warning:  There may be some political ranting in this blog post.  I apologise to anyone who is offended but hopefully if you read this you are friendly enough.

When you walk a dog you meet some strange people and have strange half-conversations.  This morning I met my father and a young couple taking their baby-buffer puppy for a walk - they were walking and the dog was wrapped up in a blanket being carried (strange people) and had a half conversation with a woman who said, "It's alright he's friendly enough."  I began to wonder what friendly enough might mean.  In my experience, most good dogs aren't really very friendly at all, they sort-of ignore each other, after they've sniffed bums and decided that they aren't from the same pack they just go on their way.  They pretend to be friendly, look excited, wag their tails, sometimes jump up at the owner of the other dog for a pat on the head or a treat from the pocket but often that is followed by a dodging move, where both dogs pretend that no interaction was ever intended in the first place. Obviously, she might have been telling me that her dog didn't bite but I had already assumed that from the flexi-lead and the lack of muzzle but I suppose you can never tell, as some owners are just stupid.

This thought about stupid people led me onto thinking about politics, which has been bothering me since the Rochester by-election.  There is a general election coming up and I think the world and it's attitude to politics has gone completely crazy. No one seems to know what any party stands for anymore and people are voting for the MP that looks friendly enough.  We all know that at any moment they could bite but seeing a smiling man in a pub looking friendly enough can win many people's vote.  Even if that man is saying that he will abolish the department for culture because it won't be needed when they send back all the non-British, people still thinks he looks friendly enough.  Even if he says that he opposes all measures to stop climate change and plans to blow up all wind farms that's OK because he still looks friendly enough.  Even if he says that he will refuse anyone who is HIV positive in the country then that's not a problem because he looks friendly enough. Even if he wants to legalise handguns then that will be perfectly fine because he looks friendly enough.

A colleague said that he was thinking that if UKip won many more seats we should all just leave, which might be necessary because I doubt many of us have pure ancient Briton genes,  but I quite like it here.  Admittedly, I'd probably like it even better in the Caribbean.

Since the by-election a Labour MP was sacked for tweeting a picture of a house. Ed Miliband was apparently shown up by Myleene Klass, although I watched the programme and seeing her squeak, "You can't just point your finger and tax things" and watching him laugh at her ignorance didn't make me think he'd been shown up. The hashtag #cameronmustgo has been trending on twitter. Politics is dead.  It has become a joke.

I'm not surprised.  What sane person would want to be an MP? Everything you say will be twisted, you will have to make decisions about impossible things, you will age 10 years in the space of 2. If you have a semi-detached house in London and you are a Socialist the Daily Mail will print a picture of it and accuse you of being a millionaire.  If you are a Conservative The Guardian will write wordy articles about what you are doing wrong that most people will never read all of.  I know there are people who say that there are benefits, such as being able to award yourself a  10% pay rise and having an extra housing allowance but money isn't everything.  It's not a job I'd do for any amount of money.

I'm quite upset about the sacking or resignation (depending on which bit of the press you read) of Emily Thornberry.  I don't know her and I don't know if she is snobbish and looks down on the poor but I do know that this was her tweet.

I can't see the judgement.  England flags are the adopted symbol of those people who claim to want a 'white britain' and the council seat of Rochester had just been won by an MP whose party wants just that.  My daughter sent me this picture of her MPs office on the Narborough Road in Leicester.

I very much doubt if the MP put the flag there herself, as she represents a very diverse electorate.  I find the idea that people who claim to love England are prepared to deface the flag in this way and I'm very confused about the concept of Anglophobes.  This makes me very worried and think that most people just aren't being friendly enough.

Emily Thornberry may be a snob, who doesn't like flags or she may be someone who thinks three is overdoing things slightly.  I don't know. Maybe you know what she was thinking but I don't.  The press phoned her to ask her what she was doing by tweeting it and she just said that she thought the image was 'extraordinary'.  I don't think extraordinary implies judgement it just means more than ordinary.

I'm upset because I want a bit more fight in my MPs.  I want someone to represent me who is prepared to stand up for what they believe in and not cave in to the first journalist who sees things differently.  In the last few days Ed Miliband has been running round saying that he loves white vans and quite frankly that is extraordinary. There is such a thing as being too friendly.

People don't like Emily Thornberry though because she is wealthy.  She worked hard at school, became a human rights lawyer and then a barrister and married a man with a title who is a high court judge.  She invested some of her wealth in property.  This seems to be the biggest crime a labour party MP can make.  How dare they not be from the North, be fighting their way out of a wet paper bag and wearing cardboard boxes for shoes?  To be a socialist, the aim is to lift yourself out of poverty and then pay a decent amount of tax to lift others out of poverty.  It is not to stay forever poor.  We need educated socialist politicians and educated clever people have usually had careers that pay them very well before they go into politics (or have a good inheritance, so they could start politics early).  Gladstone, Disraeli, Joseph Rowntree, Octavia Hill and even Nye Bevan (I know his Dad was a coal miner but he had scholarships to the best schools and universities) weren't poor when they made lasting changes that gave workers rights and helped the poor lead healthier and happier lives. I know that labour politicians have a hard time from the press and can't win whatever they do and I remember when Michael Foot was pilloried for wearing a warm but not very expensive coat. Maybe she had to go because she wasn't friendly enough.

The idea that you have to be poor or Northern to understand what people are going through is bonkers.  All it takes is compassion.  At the weekend I noticed that India Knight (a twitterati journalist) was accused of not understanding what it was like to be an immigrant by someone because her mother (who was a Pakistani immigrant) married a wealthy man.  I don't think that person was being friendly enough.

Theresa May was on Desert Island Discs this week, with unsurprisingly conservative music choices (Fanfare for the Common Man, Elgar Cello Concerto and Magic Flute) and when she was accused of being boring and not going to the pub with other MPs (I'm sure Sue Lawley put it much more eloquently than that though) she said that she thought women in politics should be allowed to be who they are and not pretend to be something they're not. This is probably the only thing I will ever agree with Theresa May over but I think she needs to be careful, as not going to the pub could be seen as not being friendly enough.

I would like to turn it round.  I think it's time that we were all friendly enough and gave the politicians a bit of a break and let them get on with running the country and while we're at it we could give the teachers a bit of a break and let them get on with teaching our children.  In fact let's just try to be friendly enough, sniff a few bottoms, decide not to bite and move on.

Stir Up Sunday (again)

I've been writing this blog for several years now and every year I write about stir-up Sunday.  I'm sure I'm getting boring, or maybe I've always been boring.  I love a tradition and this probably makes me quite a sad woman but I believe in making my own Christmas pudding, cake and mincemeat, even though it probably costs 3 times the price of the supermarket varieties and I usually throw the cake away when I discover I'm the only one eating it and my stomach appears to be carrying twin food babies.   This tradition is a recent one; before children I had a pre-Christmas tradition of buying a small Christmas pudding each week and testing them all to find the one I liked the best for Christmas day.

I think it all started with Delia's Christmas book, which was published at the same time as the birth of my daughter.  There was something about becoming a mother that made me suddenly want to become a domestic goddess and you just can't go wrong with a Delia recipe.  But there is always an ingredient that is left out of the Christmas Pudding recipes I've seen.  Not one of them mentions the drop of blood and a hair.  It's a good job otherwise Delia would have people rushing out to get a particular blood type from a small town in Essex, Nigella would make sure that the hair was seductivly swept from the fringe while pouting in the mirror, Jamie would have us sniff a lot while we dropped the blood in and Mary Berry would insist on the sacrificial blood of your first born .  Oh yes, that Mary Berry is evil, you will know if you've ever tried one of her recipes.  I do try to follow the recipe to the letter but no matter how well I tie my hair back or how careful I am with the knife and the grater these items manage to creep in.

The Delia Christmas pudding recipe uses stout and it is probably a crime to pour what you don't need in the recipe down the sink.  You may think that is a strange position to take for a non-drinker but I was brought up to believe that you didn't throw alcohol away.  It's a good job that my father is still alive otherwise he would be turning in his grave at my non-drinking and instead he can just tell people that he doesn't know how a daughter of his can be such a disappointment. So rather than drink it I searched my many cookery books, which pleased the Long Suffering Husband because he always says that I have thousands of cookbooks that I never read, until I found a recipe for sticky gingerbread that uses stout.  This gingerbread is not the biscuity kind that men and the houses that you buy in supermarkets are made from but the kind that reminds me of the picture in my childhood Brother Grim book of the house owned by the witch in Hansel and Gretel.  Co-incidentally the witch also looked a bit like Mary Berry and you could imagine her baking perfect sticky gingerbread bricks to sandwich together before decorating with every sweet ever invented.  This gingerbread is a fun recipe to make.  Once you have heated the treacle and stout together you add bicarb and stand back as the volcano erupts.  Then it fills the whole house with beautiful smells.  Everyone looks forward to having a piece for pudding (we only have pudding on Sunday) and then you get to step 5 and at the end of the paragraph in very small print it tells you to wrap the cooled bread in baking parchment and seal it in an airtight tin for at least three days.

Stir up Sunday has never been quite such a disappointment.  We now have a jar of mincemeat (to be saved for mince pies), a christmas cake (to be thrown away sometime after Christmas), a Christmas pudding (to be burnt alive on Christmas day) and the best smelling gingerbread in the world that can't be eaten for at least three days.

Qu is for Quissmass

When I was younger, I remember my mum saying that she blamed teachers for winding children up too early for Christmas.  I disagreed.  As I child, I was perfectly capable of winding myself up.  Christmas is just exciting and as soon as it gets cold children know it won't be long.

This morning it got cold and the children were excited.  I was wished, "Happy Christmas" by at least six children today and at that point I don't think I could have been accused of winding anyone up.  I had been woken in the middle of the night with a headache that just wouldn't shift and I was grumpy; "Bah Humbug," was my preferred reply.

It wasn't the best day to have a headache; my day for teaching songs to KS1 for their Nativity and knowing just how excited they already were wasn't going to help.  I knew they were over-excited when I watched a colleague write her starter sound on the board 'qu' and hear the children say, "Qu for Quissmas!"

Maybe I am responsible for winding them up too early but you can't learn ten songs in a week. This year's nativity is about an ordinary ox and I confess that it's not my favourite.  I'm struggling to get excited by the songs.  The Ordinary Ox song has the following lyrics:
"He's just an ordinary ox and he does an ordinary job he's  not a cow or a bull or a mule he's just an ordinary ox."
 One of the children asked me what an ox was.  I said that I thought it was a sort-of cow and the child said, "Well, why isn't he an ordinary cow, then?"
"Because a cow is female if it's a he then it would have to be a bull."
"Why isn't he an ordinary bull, then?"
"I don't know."
"Is a mule a type of cow?"
"No, it's a donkey, horse sort of animal."
"Oh, right."

Two faced Cow

Ox

The closest I'll ever I've get to Bull-ocks

Children can make you feel really stupid from time to time.

I asked my colleagues.  They didn't know.  They did know about Oxtail soup and we joked that our Ordinary Ox probably shouldn't have a tail and maybe could have a Heinz soup label in place of the missing tail.

Thankfully, there is the Internet and so I looked it up.  The shock! An ox is a non-breeding male cow, used for pulling carts etc.  To make it non-breeding, it has been castrated.  An ox without it's tail or it's bits!  I sent a message to my colleagues.

"I've just looked it up - an ox is a cast roasted bill"

I'm not very good at texting when I'm tired with a headache.
One colleague wondered if they put the testicles in the soup and the other said that she hated oxtail soup and as far as she was concerned it definitely tasted like b?£@!cks to her.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had a memory that bovine bollocks are a delicacy.  I googled 'bull's testicles recipes' and found that the testicles are cut off the calf when it is branded and this makes him more docile, grow meatier and stronger but less aggressive.   The testicles are thrown in a bucket of water, peeled, washed, rolled in flour and pepper and fried in a pan.  They are considered to be quite a delicacy and dating back to Roman times were eaten as an aphrodisiac.  In some places, particularly Montana and Illinois the have a twice yearly 'Testicle Festival'  Being a huge Archers fan I think that Tony Archer would love to attend a testicle festival and would be happy to donate Otto's balls to the celebration, if Tony every recovers from being crushed by Otto, in what sounded like a scene from Jurassic park.

I have so much to tell the children if they ask again.

Post Christmas Blues

I've got a severe case of post Christmas blues. It was Christmas this weekend, wasn't it?

It must have been.  Both children came home and then on Friday evening we played Christmas Carols in our pyjamas.  On Saturday we visited my parents and played cards around the table and then in the evening it got cold enough for a fire and we had a boxing day type picky food feast, where I ate my body weight in cheese. On Sunday we had a huge roast and lounged around complaining about our 'food babies'.

I should be glad.  If that was Christmas then it was quite painless.  I didn't stagger into it completely exhausted after an endless round of concerts and shows.  I escaped without any chilblains from the outdoor carol concert playing.  I hadn't lost my voice and now I'm not picking pine needles out of everything.

However, the anti climax of such a painless Christmas has left me feeling bereft.  It's a good job the first of the dozen concerts is this coming Saturday and I still have time to become drained of all energy.

Impress me

First impressions count.  People think you can tell a lot about people by what you notice on first seeing them.  This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

The online writing course I'm doing encourages us to sit in cafes and make notes about the people that we see. This has caused me to sit in cafes, drink tea, eat cake and think about writing. People watching has always been a hobby of mine and I like to wonder and imagine what their story is but instead of being inspired I have just started think about how wrong it is possible to be.  I've also been thinking about how long it can take for the truth about a person to reveal itself and how there can be things about people you think you know really well that suddenly surprise you.  I'm not talking about the skeletons in the closet that someone has carefully hidden or the things they have hidden in plain sight, like Jimmy Saville and his paedophillia. I'm talking about the boring things things like, "How could I have not known that you hate cheese, I've known you forever," or "You hate cats?  Really? You always 'like' everyone's cat pictures on Facebook."

Then, while I was thinking about first impressions a man appeared on the TV in tears.  He had been judged on what he was wearing and the world was horrified.  "Those bloody feminists, making a man cry, not appreciating the work he's actually done and judging him by his clothes."  This makes me smile.  The irony of it.  Feminists are being blamed for doing something to a man that everyone does to women all the time.  Just look at the comments about any reality TV programme and you will see that they are about what the woman in wearing and what the man says. I do feel quite sorry for the man, who doesn't strike me as the least bit mysoginistic but just has a terrible taste in shirts.  It also makes me really sad that a woman would think that she wouldn't be welcomed to work with this man because he likes brightly coloured shirts with cartoon women on.  If you were clever enough to work in this area of science, you are surely clever enough to tell him that you hate his shirt? I'm not saying that I approve of the way women are 'cartoonised' to have enormous boobs and tiny waists but I don't approve of David Beckham being paraded around in his pants for women to drool over either.

Dr Matt Taylor doing a press conference in shorts and the offending shirt (Picture from the Independent)

Then I noticed a story about a Newsreader, Karl Stefanovic in Australia, who had worn the same blue suit for a year and not one person had commented.  He started doing it in support of his co-presenter who would get terrible comments on her outfits on a daily basis and could never wear the same thing twice.  However, on the video clip he begins to wonder if it is actually sexism because he had noticed that the comments his co-host received were from women, not men, who are clearly thinking about things other than the clothes. Maybe, these are the same 'feminists' who didn't like the scientist's shirt.

Karl Stefanovic and his co-presenter who can't stand the smell anymore

So, in my cake eating sessions, I have been looking at people's clothes and wondering what they are telling me about the person.  It's not something I'm very good at because I'm always more interested in what people say and do than what they wear but I realise that other people do focus more on the outer packaging.   Is it wrong to assume that the woman in the top with the horrizontal blue lines owns a boat? or that the 50 year old woman wearing socks with her pumps, a gilet with straw in the pocket and an alice band in her hair is in an unhappy marriage and loves her horse more?  A friend joked recently that she was worried that the man she had seen at the hospital hadn't been a proper neurologist because he wasn't wearing a bow tie, so maybe clothes are a more important part of the story that I thought.

And now, I am not only unable to write but desperately anxious about what my appearance is telling people.  I don't make much effort and wear a lot of black and I don't think I even brushed my hair this morning.  I am concerned that I might look like a bit of a lush, who is too hungover to take any care over her appearance.  I worry about this because, despite being a boring non-drinker who likes to stay at home and not really talk to anyone when I'm not working, the children at school think I'm a bit of a party animal.  I know this because they were challenged to design a house for me (it was a shapes and perimiter maths challenge) and they gave me a bar in the garden so that I could 'entertain all my friends'.  I'm also a little worried that my dress sense makes me look less than normal because on Friday the Foundation Stage class were a bit distracted by the rain and one child said that it felt as though they shouldn't be at school.  I agreed with him and said that I thought it was the kind of day when you should be tucked under a duvet in your pyjamas watching a film.  Another child looked at me, wide-eyed in disbelief and said, "Do you actually have a telly?......Really?"

TOIL

Maybe I'm looking back at the past with those rose tinted specs that we all tend to wear but I'm sure when I first started work people knew how many hours they were expected to work and then they worked them.  If they needed to work extra they were asked to and then they were paid for it.  I've had lots of jobs, so I'm probably not just looking back at the one perfect job. When you went home that was it for the day.  You didn't check your e-mails or get a midnight text from your boss reminding you of a report that had to be written for the next day.  You didn't have a computer at home, so there was no working on that Powerpoint presentation until you found the font that conveyed exactly the right message.  Maybe teachers were always sitting up until the wee small hours marking books and cutting things out but I wasn't a teacher then, so I can't comment  But it's not just teachers that are working stupid hours now. I know that my sister works all day and then writes reports all evening and at weekends, my cousin works long into the evening and struggles to justify taking a weekend off from work and I have friends who answer e-mails at 3am.

Then there is this peculiar new phenomenon called 'time off in lieu' or 'T.O.I.L'.  It's a phrase that has always confused me.  Toil just sounds like more hard work not the rest you should be having because you've worked when you shouldn't have. It's a sneaky way for employers to get free work out of good natured people. Because most people have kind-of accidentally worked extra time it's difficult to measure what hours should be taken in lieu.  If you say, "I'll just take that report home and finish it while I'm watching Eastenders," is that time you should be banking?  And when you take work home to finish off do you spend more time on it than you should?  Do you take off the minute here and there that you spent putting a load of washing in the machine?


As my own worst enemy I don't add up the extra time that I do.  I don't count church services or concerts that I attend or time spent arranging music or editing tracks. I guess that many people would be having to take more time off than they were in work if they honestly counted the extra that they did.

The phrase, 'time off in lieu' has always amused me as well. Whenever anyone says they are taking time off in lieu I hear  "time off in the loo," and get a mental image that probably isn't appropriate. Toil is the beginning of toilet.

Today, I have had time off in loo, having spend much of the night suffering with a bit of a wobbly tummy.  This morning I decided to be honest (I don't suppose many teachers ever are) and take the day off to be on the safe side and have spent the day feeling guilty and a little bit of a fraud. It has been a very productive day though. I have finished the musical puppets for the EYFS teachers to use, arranged some music for the Flutti Tutti group, made a backing CD of Christmas songs for the choir performances.  practised the piano and recorded the accompaniment for our choir competition piece and studied some flute duets ready for a pupil who needs a change from their current pieces.

Maybe I need more days in the loo to get everything done.

Paranoid

  I think someone is out to get me.  

Actually,  someone is not only out to get me but out to get all primary school music teachers. You think that's a bit extreme?  Maybe.  But it is undeniable that a hardworking primary school teacher who has decided to make her life easier by singing songs that should just be easy in the run up to Christmas doesn't expect to be accidentally lured  into swearing in front of 30 (or 60 in one instance - 2 classes together) small children.

Schools buy in Christmas Nativities so that they have the script, the backing CD, the music, staging suggestions and everything they need to make it easy.  They expect to be able to put on the CD and for the children to learn how to sing the songs by osmosis.  I'm a bit old fashioned in this respect and like to actually teach the children the notes and words they should be singing.  I always get a bit worried around Christmas time, when the speed at which songs need to be learnt outstrips the time you have to teach them because these are perfect conditions for a mondegreen.  "On the first day of Christmas my tulip gave to me," "Deck the Halls with Buddy Holly," and "Sleep in heavenly peas," for example. 

This year we have bought a Nativity about an Ox and some toys. I'm still not quite sure why the Nativity needs to be re-written every year but that's another blog post.  Some of the toys are soldiers and they sing a song based on the American Military marching tune, "I don't know but I've been told...." 

 When the lyricist has tried to squeeze their words into the song they have found themselves with the word 'country' and three notes and for some strange reason they have split the word into "count- er - ry"  What's wrong with that? Try saying it.  

As I repeated the phrase over and over again in front of the class I was teaching (they just weren't getting the notes right - hence my paranoia) I was struggling to keep a straight face.  The word, split in this way, sounded like a skill the woman from Thailand, who was on the Graham Norton show many years ago, aiming ping pong balls into a bucket would have.

Graham was delighted with her cunt-er-ry skills

I have changed the emphasis now but the children will still be learning the song by osmosis and I expect to hear a few cunteries creeping in.

If this were the only bit of swearing I was about to do then maybe I wouldn't be quite so paranoid but I am also singing Frozen Karaoke, with year 3/4.  We love a bit of Karaoke and it's a music teacher's easy option.  There is a nice little Disney app, which shows the pictures from the film, puts the words over it with a dancing snowflake.  There is an option to record your performance, so all the classes can compare each other's singing.  They love it.  After we had started with the obvious 'Let it Go' I thought I'd practicse another song for next week's lesson.  

Disney Frozen App

These songs aren't easy and whilst I was hoping for an easy ride in the run up to Christmas my ears really can't take the caterwauling that occurs if I just let them sing without telling them how it 'should' sound.  I picked 'Fixer Upper' because I thought it was a great song.  That is, until I realised, that they are out to get me again.  Whose silly idea was it to put a tongue twister in the middle of a song that kids might want to sing? 

Try it.  Three times fast: The only fixer upper fixer that can fix a fixer upper ...

Disney are evil.  I have deleted my recording of the song from the school i-pad and won't be trying to sing it in this week's lesson.   

I'm becoming so paranoid that I've decide to sing all the other Christmas songs we do this year in Latin.  I'm sure it's safer.

NANOWRIMO

November has always been one of my least favourite months.  It's an anti-climatical (is that a word?) month.  It's after a birthday and before Christmas.  It's usually the beginning of cold and it has fireworks in it.  I'm not a huge fan of fireworks, although I do accept that other people like them and there will be bangs, whizzes and crashes when it's dark.  Although, it would be much more sociable to set them off during the day, I can't imagine they would be as much fun in the light. It's like February, which is also cold and pointless.  As a child I always got the two months confused. Who am I kidding?  A child?  I still do.

It is also a busy month for any music teacher.  The run up to Christmas: the attempt to teach 11 songs for a school nativity in 4 lessons, getting the reluctant year 6's to sing in Latin for the Church Service, teaching the recorder group to play Jingle Bells and perfecting the choir's repertoire of Christmas songs ready to be performed at any event or old people's home that we are asked to. The long month of November can stretch on and on.

November has always been a month of events that I wish I could join in with.  Fireworks:  I know I don't like them but other people seem to have a lot of fun with them.  Movember:  I've tried growing a moustache but it just doesn't seem to happen.

NaNoWriMo is something that I've always wanted to have a go at.  I think it stands for National Novel Writing Month and the idea is that you spend November writing a bit of your novel every day.  I assume National refers to America because of the stupid acronym, which makes it sound sort-of Mexican but there is no reason why we can't all join in.  Usually, I make the excuse of being too busy or that it is too cold to write.  There's always an excuse not to write.  But this year I have just started an online creative writing course and so there's no excuse not to try it really.

This is the 5th day of actually getting up when I wake up, pulling on my brown cardigan (every writer needs a brown cardigan), creeping downstairs and turning the laptop on.  I am proud to say that after 10 hours of writing I have a first chapter that is complete rubbish and no one would ever want to read. I also have freezing fingers and will probably be quite tired after a day with children.

H is for.....

I've probably mentioned before that I like Halloween, which is strange because all the other grumpy old women I know hate it.  I like little children knocking on my door, looking proud of themselves in their costumes.  I like decorating the house with cobwebs that are meant to be there.  I like making my trick or treat cakes (some with jam in, some with chutney).  I like pumpkin soup (although I don't really like carving the pumpkin).

This year I was feeling quite sad about Halloween because my daughter is at University having her own 'grown up' Halloween party and my son is in Salem and I'm not jealous.  Oh no, not in the slightest.  Really, honestly, I've never wanted to go to Salem and certainly not at Halloween. (This might not be true). Even the neighbours have grown up and stopped believing that I'm a witch and the Long Suffering Husband has never been interested in listening to one of my made up spooky stories.

I consoled myself, however, with the fact that it was a Friday night, which meant orchestra.  I had promised we would do Danse Macabre and Nightmare Before Christmas.  What we didn't plan on was having more adult helpers than children.  We should have known that we couldn't compete with half term and Halloween.

Danse Macabre is hard.  We had to do the same bits over and over again and I kept saying, "Let's go from H again."  A peculiar phenomenon of our orchestra is that whenever you say where we are starting from someone always asks, "Where?", so each time I repeat it I add a different ending.
"H for Happy"
"H for Halloween"

As we tried and tried again it became, "H for Hard", "H for Horrid," "H for Horrific."

I began to run out of H's.  "H for Peregrine Falcon," said one boy.  I thought for a while and said that I didn't get it, which I am ashamed of now.  How silly could I have been?  Of course H for Peregrine Falcon, it's a Hawk.

Peregrine Falcon or Duck Hawk

One of the perils of there being more adults than children is that us adults can start to get a little silly.  At the beginning of the rehearsal I had shared an 'interesting fact' with the others that I had picked up on my visit to Melton Mowbray.  Melton Mowbray is in the Vale of Belvoir, which is obviously from the French for beautiful view.  While I was there I was told I was pronouncing it incorrectly.  You don't put on your best french accent and pronounce phonetically.  Oh no, in Leicestershire this beautiful view is pronounced 'beaver'.
"Are there Beavers in the area? " I wondered but then I was sure I'd read something in the Guardian about them only being in Scotland and Devon.
We had a little chuckle about it and decided that they're a bit odd in Leicestershire.

So when I said, "H for beaver, (*whispered) hairy beaver." There were some giggles and snorts.

I still wasn't quite sure I believed it, so I asked an expert.  At my very first day at University I met a girl from Leicester (we've been friends ever since and I really will make the effort to visit soon).  We used to rib her about the way she spoke, when she said things like, "Shall we catch the buzz?" and "Would you like a cheese cob?"

It is true. It's the Vale of Beaver, Beaver Street and Beaver cordials.  She told me that it explains why she was never any good at French.

My favourite drink, other than water

Thank goodness the Belvoir cordials and presses hadn't been invented
otherwise we would have really laughed at her when she asked us if we fancied a glass of Beaver juice!