If you’re wondering what on earth is going on with my WordPress blog, you’re not wondering in vain. I’m experimenting with the “P2? template from Automattic (the guys that make WordPress). The main thing about P2 is that all comments are visibleso (as a reader) you can see any conversation. P2 also appeals because it’s stripped of anything that’s (probably) not needed.
This morning my better half had a meeting with our youngest’s school teacher. It’s worth mentioning that this teacher has the best name I have ever heard for an infant teacherI’m not going to share it directly here because this is a public forum, but trust meit’s good. It’s akin to calling a male teacher “Mr Fantastic”.
I’m already wandering off the story, aren’t I.
I had to take the kids to school. In the rain. This didn’t pose too much of a problem; each child was suitably attired in a big coat with a hood, and the younger ones had scooters (this was a crafty trick apparentlythey get to school twice as fast if distracted with their own scooter). I was just explaining this crafty trick to our eldest while walking along a particularly puddle populated and muddy path when I heard a crash far off in front of us.
You’re way ahead of me.
Little Miss 6 was led in the puddles and leaf mulch on one side of the path, with her scooter jettisoned into the undergrowth on the other side of the path. For a few moments she led on the ground, horrified at her own predicament, without making a sound. She looked back at me as I approached, shouting “up you get then”, and finally let rip.
How do you tell a small child they are fine when they have mud streaked up their coat, soaking wet tights, and bits of leaf stuck in the hood of their coat? It just goes to prove that children really don’t care that much about how they look, because 50 yards further on (after a very noisy, very slow, very tearful trudge) she re-mounted the scooter and charged after her little sister. They got about 50 yards before nearly being run over by a car backing out of it’s drive. We really need to impress on them the idea of LOOKING WHERE THEY ARE GOING. I ripped the scooters from their hands and carried them (and pushed my bike) the remainder of the way to school.
Arriving at school brought “Hellos” with lots of parents I vaguely know, and I somehow ended up taking various young friends to the school door too.
Handing over the final child to the awaiting teachers on the doors of the primary school, I marched off up the road; time to get my hair cut! (it has been slowly turning from vaguely smart, into full-on village idiot over the last couple of weeks). I sat down in the hair dressers and was about to be called to a chair when a little voice in the back of my head told me “you’ve got no money”. Seeing the bizarre spectacle of a customer preparing to leave before even talking to anybody, the head hairdresser looked at me quizically.
“I just realised I need moneyI remembered I haven’t got any on me”
“You can get it afterwards if you wantyou just need to leave something here”
Seeing that the guy who would have cut my hair had only just arrived anyway, I offered him time to go and make coffee, and wandered to the cashpoint and back. It’s weird how the ten minutes leading to 9 o’clock in the morning are manicwith cars seemingly hell bent on crashing into each other, and yet ten minutes later the town becomes deserted.
While getting my hair cut a quiz played out on the radiowith the station playing various songs from a given year with listeners invited to guess which year it was. There are no prizes (it’s just something to do for people with boring jobslike cutting hair, and trying to make conversation with strangers). I seem to remember “Ordinary World” played, by Duran Duran. I’ve not looked it up yet, but we guessed 1996.
Leaving the hair dressers, the heavens predictably opened, and I realised I hadn’t picked waterproofs up on my way out of the house. Three miles on a mountain bike in fine drizzly rain.
Wonderful.