the price of oil

and it lost $10 yesterday - the theory is we won’t need oil when we are all living in yurts

there is a whole story of how Daddy is going to teach Grandmum to write web pages.

d: “It would be nice if Grandmum lived next door, because then we would be close and only have a few steps to Grandmum”

r: “but how would Grandmum get to work?”

d: “she could go to work with daddy”

r: “but daddy does different work from Grandmum, daddy writes web pages”

d: “daddy could teach Grandmum to write web pages at work!”

and more:

“mummy can I have your pyjamas when you die?”

“mummy, does henry like his foot?” - “yes he likes his foot!” - “if he lost his foot he would have to have a grown up one” - “no feet aren’t like teeth”

“will I be able to talk when all my teeth fall out?”

and she just told us we aren’t the only ones. today at tumble tots she asked

“why is it called equipment?” and got the response “because it’s the equipment!” They weren’t quite ready for her.

With this in mind, we perhaps shouldn’t have been discussing which CBeebies presenters might be on crack cocaine. “cracked again?! what’s cracked again”, daddy jumps in “like humpty dumpty, he’s cracked again…”

"Improved Torcade" - the friendly writing that greets you when you look down our toilet.

I’m going to talk toilets for a little bit; in our toilet bowl - which may well be original to the house - are the words “improved torcade”. for ages I assumed it red it as a strange way as saying torquage (still not a real word i know).

I would often think why would improved torque be good for a toilet? and how would you know. anyway I’ve just searched google, and nothing. it’s not real - nothing even close or bathroom related.

So does anyone know what “improved torcade” means in our toilet? guesses on a postcard please .

An experiment conducted in the UK discovered that drivers gave far more space to cyclists that did not wear helmets, than those who did.

The researchers concluded this was because motorists interpreted the helmet as a symbol of a more predictable and sensible cyclist, one less likely to veer into their path.

I’m still going to wear my helmet, I just need a way to look less sensible to traffic trying to overtake.

Henry’s preferred approach is to sit on my knee and watch the TV, and that’s much more inconvenient.  My only consolation is that he will at least consent to being put to bed at regular intervals, since naps are still a normal part of his day.  Daisy desperately needed a nap most days last week, but refused to do the sensible thing and go to bed for it…

Henry has been sick this afternoon; so it’s almost certainly a tummy bug that he now has.. I suspect I am next and then Ruth. I don’t have the most robust immune system in the world. and I am on a bit of a run down working quite hard need a holiday stint.

It’s happened a few times in the last couple of months, so Ruth persuaded me I should go tell the doctor. The doctors wasn’t to busy; and I got my blood pressure taken (seems fine) and my heart listened too. apparently it’s quite slow (64bpm); which is typical of athletes and the like. I don’t think it’s the three weeks of riding my bike, more likely the falling asleep in the waiting room, but you never know. So I’ve got to go for a load of blood tests and book an ECG; which I waited until I was in work to do so i could scare the boss

I don’t - and neither does my doctor - think there is anything major wrong, but i’m going to have loads of test; I’m not a doctor but: my bets on an iorn deficency. we shall see.

Yesterday we had a little bit of an improvement; we ended up on blundellsands beach with Daisy wading in the water, throwing stones and show some interest in running and having fun. She did sleep all the way, and complain most of the way back, but for a short while she was showing signs. You might say we where cruel taking an obviously ill 4 year old to the beach but we had to do it for the sanity of the family, Ruth and Henry have effectively been caged since last Tuesday, and Ruth especially was showing signs of going crazy.

in related news Henry is walking; in typical second child fashion he’s done it all on his own without parental intervention, at first he would shuffle between the table and the chair, now he just walks across the room; he’s also a climber - all the arrangements in the house we had in place since Daisy are now inadequate; Daisy was never a climber, but now it turns out if you pull out the basket from under the table you can use it to get onto the coffee table, and a cushion is great for giving you the extra lift needed to get onto the blue chair.

we did some tempory re-aragements at the weekend - we moved the blue chair and the coffee table - but we need to do some long term thinking. We are about to have a major house rethink soon, so don’t be supprised if you visit and find the bedrooms downstairs or some such strange thing.

I think I slightly scandalised my mum, at the weekend, by telling her that I wasn’t particularly bothered about the kids doing GCSEs. The fact is, I’ve become quite hostile to the idea of certification getting in the way of education.  Myself, I’m qualified to the hilt, with no particular evidence of it having done me any good - except in the sense that I really rather enjoyed writing my MA dissertation, and I’m still quite proud of it as a piece of work.  And I think that’s the key.  There are odd essays from my undergrad and postgrad career that I feel almost as proud of - they’re the ones that I enjoyed writing, got thoroughly involved in, and which consequently included moments of utter clarity, when I could suddenly see, and better yet, articulate, what was going on. I think I’ve lost my Freud essay, which is a shame, because I was rather partial to it.

The point is, the best bits of my education were when I stopped being in it for the qualifications, and started focussing on the education. The most satisfying, fulfilling, stimulating parts of the process were about the exhilaration of learning and discovering, for the sheer satisfaction of doing so. It was about intellectual achievement, not about doing the grunt-work towards getting a certificate.

That’s what I want for my children. I want their education - at every level - to be about the joy of doing something you couldn’t do yesterday, of understanding something you didn’t understand yesterday, of making a connection you hadn’t made yesterday. I don’t want it to be about slaving away at something that doesn’t interest you, just to get to the certificate.

Now, there are exceptions to this rule; I’m not sure if that’s because I’m applying it inconsistently, or because life simply isn’t that good. I do still think that learning to read is important, that qualifications in Maths and English are expected by almost everyone you’ll meet in adult life, and that certain goals require a certain amount of grunt-work to get to them. If, for example, you decide you want to be a doctor (example rather than maternal aspiration), you have to study medicine at University, and you have to achieve the minimum requirements to access that course - probably sciencey A Levels, and probably Maths and English GCSE to boot. In order to study A levels, you may be required to take more GCSEs than that, too, and almost certainly, some of that process will be boring - however, if you’ve stepped onto that treadmill with a specific goal in mind, and done it consciously, you’re likely to be less hostile towards the boring bits, because you’re committed to achieving your goal.

A visual representation of the forest that had to be chopped down to support my educational journey, ages 4-28.

It’s not the same thing as studying as many GCSEs as you can fit into your timetable, with very few real choices as to what they are (in my day, the choice amounted, for most people, to History or Geography, and I get the impression it’s even more prescriptive, now), and then choosing the subjects you hate least to study as many A Levels as you can, so you can go to University, because everyone has told you that you simply MUST go to University.

Don’t get me wrong. University is great, not least because it’s the very first time you get a free choice of what to study, and in what depth. Sadly, most undergrads (myself included) take a long time to get out of the habit of studying because you have to, and into studying because you want to. Lots never manage it. Having got so far on doing work, to get marks, to get grades, to get qualified, to have a piece of paper to wave about saying how qualified you are, the joy of learning is so long since squashed that it’s irreparable. But, if you’re careful, if you choose your course properly, and keep your eye out for the bits that are genuinely interesting to you, University can be the place learn how to enjoy learning again - to essentially relearn what came so utterly naturally to you before you ever started school, because young children love learning; nothing gives them greater pleasure.

I coasted for most of my academic career, and actually, that’s not terribly fulfilling.  I was lucky - I was bright enough to get away with it.  My mum is convinced that in a different school, I would have gained straight As at GCSE, but that I lacked the ethos of work around me to get me to put in the effort.  I’m not convinced.  I mean, she might be right, but I’m not convinced it would have changed my life’s direction in the slightest.  Instead, I learned fairly early on how much effort was required to achieve what I need to achieve.  I didn’t get straight As, but I got C and above for all my subjects.  Since no-one ever requires a GCSE A grade, it was perfectly adequate, and since I wasn’t engaged with the process of learning for it’s own sake, I saw no reason to work any harder than I needed to.  But since my desired A level course accepted me, and my desired degree course accepted me (well, my second choice did, and there were extenuating circumstances around the time of the exams), I’m now more or less where I was always heading.  A different environment might have changed my attitude, but not my outcome.

I would much rather my children were engaged with learning, than engaged with gaining qualifications, on the off-chance that they might need them one day.  And on the day that they decide that they want to do X, and that the best way to achieve that is go through the process of Y and Z, they’ll know why they’re doing it, and hopefully be motivated by that knowledge.

What does interest me, is looking at who is playing Old Man Potter.

If you haven’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life go watch it now, I’ll wait; Old Man Potter is a local businessman who is motivated by money and a desire to run Bedford Falls. When there is a run on the bank, and on the Buildings and Loan Company, it’s Old Man Potter who starts buying while everyone else is selling, thus giving him huge sway over everything when it calms down.

The credit crunch is much like the run on the bank, and just like It’s a Wonderful Life, there are people selling while Mr Potter’s buying. At the moment I think it’s Barclays who are doing the best impression of Potter, buying just the nice bits of Lehman Brothers, and not making too much of a fuss about it. Lloyds (The Stupid Bank) are running a close second, merging with HBOS.

But as they are somewhat being forced into it by government- it isn’t quite as good.

I think when the dust settles, there will be a nice big Barclays while the rest pick over the scraps that not everyone is sure they want. Not that I understand economics, or think this is any way to run a planet, but it’s a bit interesting, for now.