It’s ‘Own Clothes Day’ at my children’s schools today, to raise money for Haiti.
At breakfast I explained to my daughter, 4, what the money was for. She said ‘we know a song about an earthquake.’
I’d seen a Met Office primary school weather song sheet (’I hear thunder’ to the tune of ‘Frere Jacques’ and so on) so I was wondering if maybe the British Geological Survey had something similar.
On closer questioning it turned out she was referring to ‘Earthquake’ by Little Boots, which I must admit to listening to in the car Rather Loudly most mornings (when I’m not listening to Yesterday in Parliament on Radio 4 Long Wave, of course). It’s a guilty pleasure.
So I imagine that song will be off the radio playlists for a while…
Sesame Street is 40 years old, and I did wonder this morning why my children can’t see it. Could this PBS show that aims to reach out to so many people, not be on free-to-air TV in the UK?
But it’s not on Sky. It’s not on Nickelodian. It’s not on TV at all in mainland Britain. I’m stunned.
I love Sesame Street for its humour, its colour… and the fact that it taught me to read before I went to school. And count to 10 in Spanish.
Gowing up in North Somerset was good for something: apparently HTV showed it before anyone else.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8340141.stm
There I was minding my own business, pretending to write but really reading Bilgewater by Jane Gardam and listening to songs with ‘Grace’ in the title - Grace is the name of Bilgewater’s friend and nemesis - when the phone rang.
It was Marian from down the road. A moustrap had gone off in her kitchen, but rather than swiftly dispatching the mouse to rodent heaven or hell, it had merely trapped its tail. The children had been hysterical before school: “Mummy you love animals, you can’t kill it!”. It had played dead for a while but was now wriggling vigorously. Although she knew I was busy getting mince out of the freezer, could I assist?
Pausing only to retrieve the mince I’d utterly forgotten about (how did she know?), I slid down the unsalted, icy pavements to number 7. The mouse had buried itself in the very corner of the room. Marian offered me a chisel. Clearly I was expected to woodwork it to death.
Call me a wuss (thank you) but I put my hand in a plastic bag and flipped the mousetrap and mouse in the bag and tied a knot in it. The bag was wriggling. So after some humming and hawing - kill it? chuck it in the bin as it was? I took it outside. Marian provided me with a bag of cement which I dropped on the bag. Cement went everywhere but the mouse wriggled no more.
So I murdered Marian’s mouse. But I think she’s an accessory at the very least.
And I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - we do not need to watch Outnumbered.
Possibly undocumented pleasure of family life: my daughter has a pink tube of Lisa Simpson toothpaste; the boys have a blue tube of Bart Simpson toothpaste. The contents are identical. Whenever possible I make sure the boys get toothpaste out of the Lisa Simpson tube, and my daughter gets Bart Simpson toothpaste.
I get my kicks where I can.
Oh, and just now - file under ‘don’t kids just say the darndest things’. William (6) said: “I know what girls have instead of willies. FASHION!”
Thanks William. That explains everything.
Today I was killing time while my sons had their swimming lesson. I walked around the outside of the pool with my daughter. As we got ready to go back inside I heard a man say to his young son “the Astra is basically Vauxhall’s version of the Focus”. And it’s at times like that that I think I know why Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Who?! The man who is talking over Doctor Who from Russel T Davies. The seriously cool man who wrote the Best. Episode. Ever: “Blink”. He also wrote “The Empty Child” (’are you my mummy?’) which is the SCARIEST. EPISODE. EVER. I only have to say ‘muuuuuuuumy’ in that voice and my five year-old son flinches and runs to find cushions, which is frankly a useful weapon to have in one’s arsenal, and for that alone respect is due to the scare-meister Moffat.
He also wrote Press Gang, but I’ll forgive him that. And the new Tintin movie which might not suck after all.
NOTE: Just read this on Wikipedia and - if true - I like him even more now:
During production of the second series of Press Gang, he was having an unhappy personal life after the break-up of his first marriage. Producer Sandra C. Hastie was secretly phoning his friends at home to check if he was alright. His wife’s new lover was represented in the episode “The Big Finish?” by the character Brian Magboy (Simon Schatzberger), a name inspired by Brian: Maggie’s boy. Moffat brought in the character so that all sorts of unfortunate things would happen to him, such as having a typewriter dropped on his foot.
I love church halls and village halls. I can still recall the mural in the village hall where I grew up in North Somerset, painted in the 1960s with villagers of the time dancing round a may pole.
Today my wife was detained elsewhere with work and I had to take my eldest son to the rehearsal for his first Holy Communion.
While the children were running around the church hall - put any number of 8 year olds together and they will spontaneously play ‘it’ - I climbed the stage and explored. At the rear, a room full of chairs and old fridges. To the side of the stage a toilet marked GENTLEMEN (don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, for she is sure to get caught short). A ladder. Had to climb the ladder. The ladder took me to a dusty room high above, to one side of the stage. Here was the handle to open and close the curtain. Chalked above it the words “FROM 17/10/69 ONLY 7 TURNS REQUIRED TO CLOSE CURTAIN”.
There’s a very odd atmosphere in our community today. It’s never been so quiet, even on a Sunday. Especially on a Sunday.
Very odd seeing the priest that baptised my daughter being interviewed live on the BBC News Channel. I keep seeing people I know on TV, in tears.
Very hard trying to tell my son Henry, who is 8 and was in the same class as Jimmy Mizen’s youngest brother, not to worry and that this sort of thing won’t happen to him. But if it can happen to a boy like Jimmy, who went to Henry’s school, a few yards from Henry’s school in the middle of a sunny Saturday, it’s hard not to think that it can happen to anyone.
Sometimes I get bored reading the same stories and singing the same lullabies to my children. So I substitute lines from popular songs. Ten points if you can spot the artists at work here:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the earth so high
Like Jeff Goldblum in the fly
Twinkle, twinkle little star
It’s not quite a Jaguar.
…in the words of Mr William Bragg.
We were walking home tonight and saw an amazingly bright satellite tracking across the sky, far brighter than any I’ve seen before. And I’ve seen a few - I love watching bits of space hardware scooting silently across the night sky.
Back home I found a neat web site - http://www.heavens-above.com/ - that allows you to enter your location and get predictions for the brightest satellites, including star and ground maps of their trajectory.
The really bright one we saw turns out to have been the International Space Station, which is pretty cool. The kids were impressed, for a minute or two…
I’ve just done some more reading and noticed two things:
- According to their daily schedules, the astronauts spend an awful lot of time ‘formatting PCMCIA cards’ - maybe it’s code for having a dump.
- The ISS is currently docked with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, so maybe that’s why it was so incredibly bright tonight
Recent Comments