Packing for holiday: clothes or books?

We go to Cornwall on Saturday. The weather looks good for the coming week, and The Daughter says the sea is as warm as the Mediterranean, sending me a link to a local website in case I needed proof. Actually, last weekend's newspaper told us the weather was gorgeous and had photos of dolphins showing off to the tourists, so here's hoping...  

I have chosen The Holiday Book: The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller. It didn't take me long to choose - I was won over by the recommendation on the front cover: 'A dreamy, post-apocalyptic love letter to things of beauty.' My favourite genre, I am running out of bleak-but-hopeful books to read, so it was good to find a new one. Actually, just now looking at the book on Amazon, I've read through the 'people-who-bought-this-also-looked-at' bit, and have managed to add another dozen books to my Amazon wish-list.

There is just one problem - I have no will-power when it comes to books, and after promising myself I would save the book for holiday, I am now on page 93. So I'll also take Flight Behaviour, by Barbara Kingsolver and The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy with me. Rather thick books, they leave me room for not much more than a pair of jeans and a camera. 

I received the certificate for the RE course through the post yesterday. I keep all my certificates in a big file which I only tend to look through when I'm desperately hunting for lost birth/marriage certificates. Half the time I can't even remember doing the courses (did I really do that course on ADHD? I don't remember a word of it). My degree certificate will be different of course. I shall frame that so the last four years of slog will be worth something. Mind you, The Husband may just see it as the big hole in our bank account, so better not. 

So... getting ready for our holiday. We have a larger car this year, and less people to take (no girlfriends of sons or other hangers on), so the journey should be more comfortable. It's a fairly long journey (six hours driving, plus approximately two hours' queuing to get into Cornwall - usually resulting in cheers as we crawl past the county sign at five miles an hour). It necessitates a couple of stops at service stations which charge the earth for a cup of coffee, so we tend to fill the car with drinks, biscuits, packets of sweets and other healthy things. It's amazing how hungry you get, watching scenery and hankering after other peoples' cars. Son Number One usually manages to get just past Mildenhall before starting on his lunch, even though he's reminded that he only had breakfast twenty minutes earlier. And there's a limit to the number of Costa Coffee signs I can drive past without complaining. Really, it's a wonder The Husband doesn't just leave us on the side of the road. At least the children are past the age of needing the toilet every half hour. And being car sick - that was a joy of a phase: washing out children's t-shirts in the hand basins of the public toilets, or carrying a half-naked child through town so I could buy clothes to replace the ones I'd had to bin. Happy days...   

And now I will go back to constantly refreshing my OU webpage, in the hopes that my assignment has been marked. My tutor is moving house in a few days, she said, so aims to get all essays returned asap. Then it's just two more assignments to go, and that course is finished. I'm looking forward to the religion and controversy one. We've been told to keep a look out for when religious issues appear in the news. That'll be 24 hours a day, then. 

Enjoy your summer - I'm off to pack some books. 

One down...

I received an email yesterday, telling me I'd passed the RE course. (It was a pass or fail thing, but I'm still disappointed I didn't get a merit.) And now I've got an essay for the counselling course to be finished. I'm lucky that I've got a wonderful tutor for this one, who told me exactly where I lost points in my last piece of work. She is, it seems, a stickler for introductions. Not that I don't write them, she just wants 'proper' ones that say things like, 'This essay will consider...' and so on. In four years with the OU, it's the first time I've had to do that, and it feels very clunky. So I've written it (the intro, that is, had you expected more?) and am so embarrassed by it that I've come on here to recover and do some normal writing. Okay, so I've also done the hoovering and re-sorted the bookshelves - I just really, really don't feel like writing about existential therapy (or is it that I'm putting things off that cause anxiety? Maybe I should face this feeling of being hemmed in and decide where I want to go with my life? Maybe I should challenge my own assumptions about the world and how people view me? Maybe I should stop taking counselling courses.).

And I have books to read. The Bookworm (one of our former year 6 girls) bought me a present when she learnt it was my birthday next month. It was a second-hand book by Adriana Trigiani, which she said 'looked like my sort of thing'. It was - I already own it, but it's made me want to read the series it was from again, starting with Big Stone Gap. I'd forgotten how good the books are, so thank you, Bookworm, I'm very grateful. (And that reminds me, I have to buy the holiday book on Monday, when I go into town for Son Number Two's eye test.) 

Plus, the garden is looking nice in the sunshine. Well, that's not actually true. It looks awful, with weeds and a big pile of earth that's going to become part of a new lawn 'eventually', but there's a lot of wildlife, probably because of the weeds, etc. We have damsel flies chasing each other about, numerous butterflies, bumble bees, a kingfisher flitting down the stream, and frogs aplenty, much to the delight of the cats, who think these bouncy creatures are there just to amuse them. I have had to rescue a record number of frogs from the cats this year. I hadn't realised that frogs play dead when they're threatened. The first one looked all 'bleah' and floppy, so I carried it to the stream, whereupon it miraculously came to life and leapt of my hands into the water. After that heart attack, I'm now prepared.  

Sigh... It can't be put off any longer. I will drag myself over to Word and try to add to the 82 words I've already written. Actually, I've just read through them again. It looks completely wrong: how can an essay 'consider' anything? It's me that's doing the considering, but we're not allowed to write in the first person. Why didn't I take creative writing? I could have written any old rubbish for that...

Courses, goodbyes and young criminals.

I have finished my RE course.  I've not got my results back yet, but, heck, who cares? It's not going to count for anything. We only do RE for half a term a year, and very little of it has anything to do with me. The whole course thing was, I think, a 'ticking-a-box' exercise for the school. I have to admit that I've learnt an awful lot, though - mainly through clicking on links from research I was meant to be doing. For example, I have learnt I am a Pagan with Pantheist leanings (or is it the other way around?), that the worst thing about a website on Satanism is their continual use of the phrase 'very unique', and that actually, religious labelling is pretty much a waste of time as most people do things their own way, anyway. From research for my 'Is there unity in diversity?' essay, it seems there are no two people who believe in the same thing. We may choose a label that defines us the most accurately, but then we pick up extra bits or discard the practices we disagree with. Thus we end up with people saying things like, 'I am a committed Christian/Jew/insert religion here, but I support gay marriage/the Dignity in Dying campaign/the teaching of evolution in schools/another potentially controversial idea....' So that makes me a Pantheist-Pagan with a smattering of Taoism, believing in Karma, quality books and good whisky. I'll name that religion in... um... a while. 

Take a spoonful of each, mix well and 

stop arguing.

We said goodbye to most of our year 6 children last week. Every year, I promise myself that I won't get upset, but yet again I did. We've had a morning in which we welcomed (hmmm... is that the right word? I'm not sure...) our new students. Some were nervous (our reputation precedes us), and some were over-confident know-it-alls (not for long). They had to fill in a question sheet, writing about favourite subjects and best friends. It also gave us a chance to suss out who shouldn't be sitting next to each other, and who had neat writing. 'You're going to get sick of me nagging you,' I told one boy, 'so you may as well sort your handwriting out now,' and he gave a resigned sigh, rubbed out his work and started again. Good lad. I think we've got another 'moving on' morning tomorrow. I bet they're really looking forward to it. 

Earlier this week, a girl and her mother sought me out and gave me a story the girl had written for our school book blog. 'She spent such a long time on it,' said Proud Mother. 'We tried to find you yesterday, but we couldn't, and she was devastated.' (I really hate the over-use of that word. She wasn't devastated, she was probably just a bit put-out because I had seen her coming and was hiding in the stock cupboard.) Anyway, I started typing it out on the school blog this morning and thought how good the punctuation was. Naturally, that made me rather suspicious, so I pasted the first paragraph into Google. It turned out that the whole thing had been lifted from a rather sickly children's book about sisters. Plagiarism at such a young age... and aided and abetted by Proud Mother, too. Hopefully, they will log on to the school blog today (I told them it would be typed up over the weekend) and see my 'by the way' notice instead. I will hand back the child's story tomorrow and do my best not to smirk at Proud Mother. 

Study and swearing

I am trying to get back on track by starting my RE assignment. It's been put on hold for a couple of weeks, with the permission of my very patient tutor. (She's probably just relieved she won't have to read my dire offerings for a while.) I worked for several hours and had three full pages of notes, plus a huge great list of useful websites. 'Brilliant,' I thought, 'I'm finally getting somewhere.' 'Do you want to save changes to the document?' Word kindly asked. Of course I did. And I clicked on 'Don't save' (Why??!!!!). After a frantic Google search and advice from a teenager, I was unable to retrieve my notes. I was very well behaved. I swore like mad in my head, but outwardly I just sighed and started again. 

I've used my internet history to retrieve the website addresses, but will probably never recover the brilliant insights within my notes (gives hollow laugh). At least I know roughly what I want to write about, which I will start on tomorrow as an excuse not to join in with the family yard sale. 

Other news: the Brother-in-law's operation went well and he's now back home. Complaints are about to be registered against his GP who refused to even consider that his health problems were physical, not mental. Apparently, the resulting month's delay in his treatment nearly killed him. 

The Father-in-law is extremely unlikely to recover from his stroke. He has made no improvement and the doctors are now talking about palliative care. 

The Daughter came up from Cornwall to visit him, which was a much-needed highlight for us. Son Number One is playing cricket at the moment, and has a job working a few hours a week with the local river warden, which he's really enjoying, and Son Number Two has just returned from an Eminem concert in London. The Husband is raiding the shed and occasionally appearing to ask, 'Do we want this?' before adding the rusting junk things to the yard sale pile. 

And me? I've given up studying for the day and am going to make a very strong cup of coffee. I think we have one day about mid-August when there's nothing planned, so I may book my nervous breakdown for then.