Tag Archives: family

end of term report

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This time of year always catches me out. For some reason I imagine the last few weeks of the summer term as a gentle stroll towards the holidays. In my dream version of June into July, it is comfortably sunny, meals can be eaten outside, everyone is in a permanently good mood, the house is miraculously tidy and children skip happily to school. There is no homework, there are no lost shoes or jumpers, packed lunches are not found squashed at the bottom of school bags. Nits have been eradicated from the planet.

The reality is of course quite different. Over the last month one child has been to camp and back, returning with a sack of muddy clothing, a headful of nits and totally knackered, but happy; another child has been to Germany and back, returning with  broken walking boots, muddy trainers and clothes which look as though they haven’t been worn at all      (v. strange and concerning), she too is knackered, but happy. Admits that she got lost for an hour in a vast theme park and didn’t speak a word of German all week  - apart from mumbling something as she fumbled for the card she’d been given by her teachers on which was printed “the bearer of this card is a foolish english school child, who is no doubt scared and lost, please can you guide them to the nearest phone and dial this number….” or some such, but I can’t be sure as it’s all in German.

The youngest has been in a swimming gala, “it was rubbish mum, I came last in everything, I’m glad you weren’t there. Why weren’t you there?”, not so happy. The middle one, who was in the same gala, thought it was all hilarious, as woggle races tend to be, and had to borrow swimming things from a friend because her older sister had taken her swimming costume to Germany. Yup, that’s right they share a swimming costume.

Tomorrow the youngest has a big school trip requiring spending money, “remember, mum, £3. You promised you wouldn’t forget like last time”. And the eldest has a big exam, which we all thought was today, but mercifully wasn’t as she hadn’t really prepared – she went to bed last night saying, “just wake me up really early dad, I promise I’ll do some more in the morning.” She was found up and dressed at 6am today, back in bed and unconscious at 6.15. To my every enquiry as to her progress with revision this evening she has answered, “yeah, yeah muuuum,” which I guess translates as “whatever, shut up”.

And as for me, I am meant to be chasing some feature ideas, and finishing off the DIY projects that I so unwisely decided to tackle in the middle of all this mayhem. The DIY stuff is now officially on hold, which actually means that three paint brushes have dried solid in their pots. But I will continue to chase the work, even though I know that a deadline in August is the last thing I really need. Hey ho.

On the upside, the garden is looking good in spite of evil slugs and my total neglect. And James, my other half work-wise, and I have a nice feature in this month’s Homes & Antiques – a crazy Georgian town house stuffed with dolls.

And I will finish by apologising for the rather random and unrelated photographs – the cable which connects my camera to my lap top has vanished, the vaguely relevant photographs which I was hoping to use are currently trapped on my camera. I should add, the first photograph, a road sign in Wales, pretty much sums up my current state of mind.

box of delights

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It’s hard to keep my mind on work when all this lovely fabric is sitting next to my desk.

The scraps came from Joe’s aunt, Ruth, who very generously gave me a large box of
them when she cleared out her stash a couple of weeks ago.

I spent a very satisfying afternoon playing a sort of pelmanism with the jumbled scraps, and I discovered that a lot of them are actually samples – ready-cut rectangles which are, of course crying out to be made into a quilt. And as the cutting part was what drove me demented when I made Bea’s quilt (which I blogged about here and here), I feel as though Matilda’s quilt, which keeps stalling, has just made an awful lot of progress without any effort on my part.

It’s also nice to know that this quilt, when I finish it, will be the ultimate family heirloom –  the scraps having come from her great aunt, sewn together by her mother, and if she’s lucky it’ll be on her bed before she’s started a family of her own. Though given that the last quilt was around twelve years in the making, and Matilda turns thirteen next Monday, it might be touch and go.

back to school

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The first week of school is over and we are all shattered: the children already look slightly grey and, after just five days, I am completely sick of the school run. A quick poll of fellow parents at the school gates on Friday proved that I am not alone. Not that this helps much, but it does go some way towards making me feel less inadequate.

Over the weekend we tried to get a grip on the things that regularly conspire to bugger up the week:  lost uniform; nits; lost homework; nits; ill-fitting daps (that’s Bristolian for plimsolls, which are in turn quite distinct from trainers); lunch boxes filled with half-eaten yoghurt; nits; letters and forms from teachers relating to all sorts of events which will, if ignored, come back to haunt me and a child will cry. The riot act was read several times, the volume ranged from cold hiss to very loud. Only the garden behaved itself and provided these flowers for my parents, who came to stay on Sunday night.

I think that perhaps the first week back at school is a little like the first bicker-filled weekend of the holidays. It’s a hellish stand-off during which you have to make it clear, again (how long will it take them to learn this particular, and to my mind, rather simple lesson?), that you don’t enjoy being treated like a skivvy and that please and thank you are non-negotiable. By Sunday evening all the attitude, tears and general moaning seemed to have blown over. Yesterday I bundled them off to school with almost cheery faces – mine being the cheeriest of all, of course. My mum and I then went on a fantastic tour of Bristol’s garden centres in search of plants to fill those late summer gaps. Anemones were at the top of both our lists.

Back in London my mother gardens two plots. One is her own garden in which she has to work around a design she inherited from the previous owner and which is, quite literally, set in stone. It is a paved courtyard and all attempts to increase the size of the beds only result in the excavation of vast amounts of rubble and concrete. The second garden has been created from scratch on a plot of land which belongs to a neighbour and sits to the side of her house. When she took it on it was nothing more than slightly scrubby grass, but now, three years on, it is a really beautiful communal garden. Annoyingly I don’t have any photographs, but my mum has kept a record and I will write about it at some point as it’s a brilliant demonstration of what can be done on a tiny budget.

And talking of budgets, Henleaze Garden Shop came up trumps with one of the widest selections of anemones at the best prices (£1.75, £3.99 and £5.99 depending on pot size). In the end I came home empty handed having found it impossible to choose between Anemone hupehensis ‘Splendens’, Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’,  ’Queen Charlotte’, ‘September Charm’ and ‘Whirlwind’. I wanted them all, but space is getting tight in some parts of the garden, and elsewhere beds will be completely re-worked in the spring. But of course now is the perfect time to buy these plants as they are in flower, and will look glorious for another month, maybe more. I will certainly return to HGS in the next week or so, but only once I have really considered these options and worked out where the plants will go. An anemone update will no doubt follow.

the view from here

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Whilst sorting through the many hundreds of photographs on our computer, I was struck by how many have been taken from a particular viewpoint: me at the back, watching the retreating forms of my family. The view in more recent photographs includes Sybil’s waggly tail and bushy bottom. She likes to shuttle between the child at the front (usually Matilda) and the parent at the back (usually me), checking, like a fussing school teacher, that we are all present and correct.

I love walking, so it isn’t laziness or lack of energy that means I’m relegated to the back, it’s more that I am the one with the camera, and I tend to stop along the way to photograph stuff. And, one and way and another, I’ve also fallen into the role of chief cajoler: I am there to urge the slowest member of the party (usually Martha), or the grumpier members (could be any of them, though usually only one at any given time), to keep going, whilst Joe tends to set the pace in the middle, with Sybil and whichever child is up for it (usually Matilda or Bea) streaking ahead.

This view also feels symbolic of motherhood as I see it: from the moment your children are born, they are on their journey away from you, escaping. Sometimes at high speed.