Clarissa et al.

How can three brothers be so different?

This week they have all been shopping. Josh (15) bought some scales on which to weigh his hawk and its food. Jacob (18) bought a gun cabinet, a radio collar for his ferret and a survival kit - hunting knife, fishing line, pocket saw, surgical needles(!!!) compass etc. While Joe (20) bought a tapestry kit, a CD of Bach organ music and a CD set of classic ghost stories.

Last night was the monthly meeting of Swallow Bookworms, and our discussion book was Lynn Truss's* "Eats Shoots and Leaves". In the discussion (10 to 2 in favour) it transpired that no fewer than four of us were English grammar freaks who had always loved parsing. All four are between 50 and 65 and went to a girls' grammar school - or rather three girls' grammar schools.

After a bit of discussion I handed out this task which my mother used to give to her teen-age pupils. (You will see from the prices that this was a good few years ago.)

The idea is that Mr.Jones has retired and left Mr. Smith as manager of his shop. When he sees this window he sacks Mr.Smith and gives you the job on condition you can correct every error.

Have fun. We did.

*"Truss's" - I put the third s in in deference to her prejudices. It is not what we were taught - see doggerel.blog.co.uk

Rather strangely nobody gave me a diary for Christmas this year; we have the family desk diary, but I had nothing to put in my handbag until Thursday when one of my colleagues, knowing my interest, gave me a Family History Diary she had spare.

This dairy contains in a hadbag size booklet lots of useful addresses both actual and web based, as well a week per page engagement diary - so far so useful. However, note the name of the diary: Family History.

Note too the first piece of advice they give to someone starting out on family history research: START with yourself - write down when and where you were born and married and details of your children. Do the same for your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents until you can go no further.

Now, I ask, where is one of the best sources for detailed information about family members?

Answer: In their diaries.

It isn't just the entries that provide information, but the page at the front with the name, address, birthdate, phone number, national insurance number, emergency contact etc. and the list of family birthdays and phone numbers at the back. In fact, without at least the name on that first page, the remainder of the diary may well become less useful as a source of family history.

This Family History Diary has no place for either at the front or the back.

One of my most fascinating sources of information I have is my mother's diary for 1953. This was the year my parents got married and notes of all the preparations for the wedding, and a list of all the places they visited on their honeymoon (as well as a very brief account of the Great Gale and the floods which devastated the east coast (see below), and of how they celebrated the coronation in Cleethorpes) are included in the text of the diary. At the front are address details (which in this case I knew, but which would have been useful in a more nomadic and less talkative family) and at the back - a list of wedding guests, a list of wedding presents and - best of all - her housekeeping accounts week by week from April to the end of the year, as well as measurements for and money spent on the wedding dress, bridesmaids' dresses, and the going-away outfit.

It isn't a private diary recording thoughts and feelings, but this fairly sparse record of events none-the-less makes fascinating reading.

Above is an example of entries scanned from the diary and put together with the photos my parents took as soon as it was possible to go for a walk on the prom. It's all right for me - I started my family history research when I was six years old - but note the profusion of names - Uncle Joe, Aunts Mary and Gwladys, Mr. Ellicott, Jack . . . I know who they all were and remember 3 out of 5, but - cross checked with the other information at the back of the diary - what a wonderful source for somebody who came to family history later in life after everyone they could have asked was dead.

I have often wondered why it is that the more adults accompanying a school party to the museum the less good the educational outcome seems to be.

Last year I put it down to the (very young) children being totally confused by the 'chain of command' - Who to obey? Parents? Teachers? Strange lady pretending to be Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle? - as well as the bad behaviour of some parents who would wander off to smoke, talk on the phone, fetch coffee or chat among themselves. Other Museum Education Assistants mention finding themselves having to 'double teach', aiming at least some of their explanations at the adult members of the audience as well as the children.

Today's group (Year 1 age 5/6, ratio 2children:1adult) were not at all badly behaved; on the contrary, they were so subdued that it was an uphill struggle to get them to participate at all when they went into the Victorian cottage to meet its Victorian resident, Mrs. Kirkby. Usually when I want children to sit in the tin bath (no water), mend the fire (pretend), make the tea (cold) etc. I am inundated with volunteers. Today's first group wouldn't do a thing except for one brave girl and one brave boy who just about saved the day. The second group was better.

Added to this, when Rachel went into the Life Long Learning Room where a range of teacher led activities is set out - handling, naming and sorting Victorian and modern artefacts, colouring and dressing-up - she found the children wandering aimlessly about and the adults chatting among themselves. (These activities are very simple: they are explained in the teacher's pack sent to the school beforehand, explained again by the MEA before she disappears to metamorphose into Mrs. Kirkby, and each is accompanied by a laminated sheet explaining what to do, but they do need an adult to keep the children organised and focused.) Then the teacher asked whether the things could be cleared away to make ready for their packed lunches. It wasn't yet 11.30 - group 1 had been doing their activities scheduled for 40 minutes for less than 10, and lunch was timed for 12.00! Moreover, being only little, the children had with them mid-morning milk and fruit which this group must barely have finished when Rachel went in.

Now, while our workshops are fairly cheap as these things go, it is, when all the transport costs are added in, quite expensive to take children on a school outing and it seems to me that the teachers should be working to make every second valuable as we do.

I am glad to say that our work has paid off and we were told at our meeting yesterday that our museum education service is rated second only to Bath's. Bath: 2,000 year old historic city known the world over for its beauty and visited by millions each year. Scunthorpe: industrial northern working-class town, first charter a mere 70 years ago and generally considered more of a music-hall joke than a centre of culture. All things considered, that's not a bad result.

I took the Toys outreach to a small, rural Church of England primary school today.

Briefly this workshop consists of a short introductory chat about favourite toys, what they do and what they are made of, followed by the children in three groups having ten to fifteen minutes play with each of a selection of 'Granddad's and grandma's toys', Victorian toys and Tudor toys, followed by a plenary session when I point out, for example, that knuckle bones, five stones and jacks are the same game and very, very ancient, that hoops are used in different ways at different times etc., the changes in materials etc., where we get the toys nowadays - Toys R Us, toy shops, catalogues, Argos, supermarkets, e-Bay etc. - compared with the toy makers and toy shops of Victorian times and the home-made toys of Tudor times and earlier. With the first group (years 1 and 2) everything went exactly as it always does with the questions and answers I expected.

After playtime it was the turn of Reception and the younger half of year 1. The talked about their toys and played as usual, then we came to the questions.

One of the Tudor toys is a very crude wooden doll - and I remarked that if your dad happened to be a carpenter he would have more spare wood and make better toys than other dads.

"Joseph was a carpenter."
"Indeed he was."
"He would have made toys for Jesus."
"I'm sure he would."
And suddenly these 4 to 6 year olds were discussing the toys of 2,000 years ago and what sort of toys Joseph would have made for Jesus.

We are so used to the image of the baby in the stable, and the 12 year old boy left behind in the Temple in Jerusalem that perhaps we are less moved by them than we should be, but somehow I found the picture of our Saviour as a child the same age as these children standing trustfully beside Joseph and fetching his tools, and playing with the toys made for him very touching.

We can learn a great deal from little children.

It's funny the things you find in coal. What is it? This is one I'll take to the museum to ask an expert about.

I came home from work yesterday (Thursday) afternoon to find that the electricity was off; not really surprising in view of the gales. I rang up to report it - just one of 50,000 in the area (our outage, it transpires, was caused by tree blowing over a couple of miles away). I continue totally unsurprised.

I had decided to do my weekend shopping on the way home. (Do you know how difficult it is trying to wheel a shopping trolley across a carpark when the wind is determined to blow you, it, all the shopping and the car doors into the neighbouring lake?) By some good chance I decided on the lazy option of buying two ready-cooked chickens. Less fortunate was the quantity of milk and fruit juice I was taking home to a temporarily fridge-less house: still, it was also an unheated house apart from the sitting room fire.

So we ate chicken salad by candlelight, and made tea on my little gas-ring which I take on picnics to the delight of my tea-loving friends and the embarrassment of my niece and god-children (the problem may be the whistling kettle rather than the gas-ring itself). Afterwards I stacked the dishwasher as I saw no point in boiling water in order to wash-up when it's too dark see whether you are getting the pots clean or not, then we settled down in the sitting room to listen to the radio (father) and read (me).

It was at this point that I really appreciated the way our Victorian forebears arranged their parlours with chairs around a pedestal table with a lamp in the centre. Nowadays we tend to think of it as a tea-table, but it was so much more. The truth is that it is very difficult to find a position in which a light can shine onto the page you are reading except by sitting at a table with your book spread directly under the lamp - then a single candle is sufficient.

Joe has a large collection of candelabras, tea-light holders, candlesticks etc. which lodge with us since Helen hates candles and won't have them in the house (nurse - ITU - seen too many burns victims)., but yesterday that collection came into its own and proved really useful.

Especially these with the glass magnifying the flame and strategically placed mirrors and silver plates reflecting the flame to throw significantly more light into the room.

All this stuff with glasses and mirrors is something I know very well in theory; indeed I quite often talk about this to the children when I am being Mrs. Harding, the Victorian housekeeper at Normanby Hall. However, every time there is a prolonged power-cut I am struck afresh with how much difference these little things make to our comfort.

This morning I had the fun of a strip wash in a cold bathroom instead of my usual nice hot shower: an interesting thought that for generations this was the standard method of keeping clean for six days out of seven. I remember my grandmother telling me about having to wash and dress under her nightdress at boarding school. She also told me about the list of requirements that every girl received before starting school which included, as well as all the standard items of uniform, one score of sanitary towels which in those days really were small towels folded and pinned for use and sent to the laundry every month. (Too much detail? Certainly enough.)

Another of the things I teach is how to use flat-irons. This morning I discovered that I had no warm clothes ironed (I don't feel the cold much and tend to dress for indoor warmth rather than winter cool), and I don't actually own a flat-iron so I put on the least crumpled. Next I phoned the electric people again and learned that we were unlikely to have our power back until this evening or perhaps Saturday, so I heated a kettle of water, got everything out of the dishwasher, and did the washing-up before it started to smell. Then I went out to the garage to chop some wood and hunt for candles. (No, of course we don't keep the car in it!) Replacing the candles it was interesting to see how sooty the glass shades were after just one evening's use and realising what a mucky, greasy daily job cleaning them must have been - especially when you have to boil every drop of water you use. Again, I know the theory, but all day little things like this kept reminding me what a hard slog women used to have keeping their houses clean, and how lucky we are now. (Mind you - I still hate hoovering.) On the other hand people on the local news tonight talking about being without electricity as being 'horendous' and 'a nightmare' are completely OTT - the outage wasn't even long enough for the things in the freezer to start defrosting.

Late in the afternoon, having given young Jack his lesson in the gathering gloom, I was just going to start on cooking dinner on a single gas ring when the burglar alarm went off signifying the return of electric power. So I reset all the clocks - oven, microwave, heating etc. and postponed starting my cooking now everything could be done simultaneously instead of serially.

Sadly the gale has blown down half our ancient lilac tree splitting the trunk; only time will tell if the remainder can survive.

For Liz
More cheerfully I bought this vase in the Matalan sale for a staggering £2.50; I think it looks really good with your flowers in it - much better than the plastic jug which was their temporary home.

Have a look at my new blog. www.doggerel.blog.co.uk

I mentioned on my blog sometime before Christmas that I could do with a nice pink fluffy bathsheet, and at Christmas I received my wish five-fold. (And very nice too.)

If I mention that it is my birthday next month and that I could do with £200,000, do you think I might achieve a similar result?

Two men have spent the whole day here laying the kitchen floor. When we came here twenty years ago it was vinyl tiles overlaid with brown carpet tiles. After living with these for a while we put down burgandy flotex which we were told was miraculous stuff which repelled dirt. Wrong. It repelled all attempts to clean dirt off it.

The new tiles are a ceramic made to look like slate, but without the uneven surface and the necessity of having to seal them. It isn't easy keeping the kitchen floor clean when the kitchen door is the main route of ingress to the house for all comers including my perennially very muddy nephews, but I am hoping these will combine the qualities of not showing the dirt and being easy to to clean.

Here is Albert on the new floor.

Things are now back to normal.

As usual this term starts slowly where work is concerned: schools do not like taking the children on trips in January, and who can blame them?

Parish Council tonight was very efficiently run by Garry while Geoff, the chairman, is in South Africa so that it ended at twenty to nine instead of the usual half-past or later. Geoff is a lovely chairman, but has the teacher's habit of explaining everything just in case we didn't understand the plans, minutes, notes etc. the first time.

Soon we will have PCC with the thorny subject (literally as it is surrounded by hawthorn hedge) of the churchyard. Some people want it mowed to being lawn perfect throughout the year while others of us prefer to leave large swathes of it unmown until late summer as a haven for wildlife, but this (cheaper) option is the less popular so we will have to work out how to fund the necessary mowing now the probation service rules have changed so they can't bring the community payback people to do this for us. They also trimmed the hedges round the playground and looked after the gardens of several aged residents. We will miss them: it was an excellent system which worked brilliantly.

They are still throwing money at the village hall - Kath's fundraising and ability to get grants is amazing - and are now replacing the comfortable but unstackable brown upholstered, wooden-framed chairs with stackable metal-framed chairs probably with burgandy upholstery. I am sure that there is a community hall somewhere in Lincolnshire which will snap up our comfy old chairs to replace their hard wooden ones.

At Swallow Bookworms we are reading (re-reading) Eats Shoots and Leaves. Preliminary chat suggests that most of us take issue with the view that a second s is added after the apostrophe in such phrases as "Mr. Jones'(s) hat". My elderly Fowler notes this as a usage in the process of change: modern editions may agree with Ms Truss, but that second s looks wrong to me, and is certainly contrary to what Mr. Waite taught us.

Today is Twelfth Night: sometimes we have a party, but I'm all partied out this year so I thought that I'd just post my quiz.

Twelfth Night has other names, but which of these are correct?
The Feast of Misrule
Old Christmas Day
The Feast of St. Nicholas
Epiphany
Saturnalia
The Feast of the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles
Candlemas
Childermas

The Three Kings brought gifts: what were the kings’ names, and what did they bring?
KINGS:
GIFTS:

“On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . .” but what did your true love give?
Assuming that each gift is repeated as often as in the song over the twelve days, how many living creatures (i.e. people, animals and birds) did your true love give you?

Some famous people were born today, but what were they famous for?
Joan of Arc 1412 (one year I actually got the schoolboy howler of Noah's wife for this one from a young guest)
Heinrich Schliemann1822
Carl Sandburg1878
Loretta Young1913
Rowan Atkinson 1955

King Richard II was born on January 6th 1367: we know that he was king, but who was his father?
Richard I?
Edward III?
Robin Hood?
The Black Prince?
Father Christmas?
John of Gaunt?

Answers in the Comments

I've just hung out the washing - actually it must be ten minutes ago as it has taken that long to defrost my fingers sufficiently to type; it is a wonderfully cold, blowy, dry day and I'm expecting to be able to bring it in dry within an hour. Of course I have had to use my gale pegs which hold on against the strongest breeze, but take a lot of manual effort when it comes to releasing the washing from the line.

It's funny how little things jog memories because as I was hanging out the washing I was transported back nearly twenty years to when I was staying with Becky in Anstruther and we had walked along the coastal path (to Pittenweem, I think it must have been) and I remember seeing all the washing hanging out on rotary clothes lines on the very edge of the harbour and wondering how much was lost into the sea each year. I still wonder. Had they all discovered these wonderful extra strong pegs which I then had not? Were losses just an accepted part of life? Did they all keep special fishing lines (and boats) for retrieving lost washing?

I must go back to Scotland: I've stayed there for four separate weeks (less than one per decade) in Argyllshire, Perthshire and the Kingdom of Fife - I love that: the Kingdom of Fife - but I've never got further north that the southern shores of Loch Ness (where there was never a monster to be seen) and the only island I've visited was Islay (on one of only two wet days twenty years apart - I spent the other in a folk museum somewhere in Fife). Other than that, I remember some lovely houses and gardens, amazing castles, breath-taking scenery, friendly people and some delicious pancakes in St. Andrews.