Clarissa et al.

I notice that virtually every blog I visit has been visited by two people (all different names) from the same site leaving wholly irrelevant cliches. Why? Is it just a ploy to get us to look at their website? Or is it something to do with tomorrow's date, and were they sent from some part of the world where that day had already started?

I'm going to delete mine since they add nothing to the general conversation, and if they are a fool they are a singularly unfunny one since there is no point to the 'joke'.

Yesterday Rachel and Margaret, who 'know I like a challenge', laid of thick fog for my journey to Hull (which makes a change from snow). It was the same school at which I first did the Toys Outreach on my own, and I asked after Hashim (now 9) who as a masterly six year old taught me how to bowl a hoop properly, a skill which I have subsequently taught some of my colleagues. Apparently he prefers the company of girls to boys and never stops gossiping.

The fog began to clear as I crossed the bridge into Yorkshire, and was completely gone by the time I had finished the workshop just after noon to be replaced by bright sunshine. Back on the right side (south side) of the bridge I called in at a couple of shops in Barton to do a bit of shopping for Easter and for Helen's birthday, and then took my pack-up down to the Humber bank where I sat on a bench overlooking the river almost in the shadow of the Humber Bridge. Hull was obscured in a light mist making it seem distant and almost beautiful while the sun sparkled on the water turning it from its customary muddy hue to myriad of greys and blues.

I then went to Scunthorpe to empty my car of the workshop materials and reclaim the back seat for my niece, her dog, her friends or - even, if there is more than one of them in the car - one of her brothers. Helen had a study day which meant she wouldn't be home until about 5 o'clock, so I went round by Caistor to pick up Josh and Jess from school. Some nutter at their school insists that they have to wear the uniform sweatshirt no matter how warm the weather! Both were very hot and uncomfortable, so I took them home to get changed, muck-out the stables and prepare evening feeds for the horses, then Josh went off on the quad to join his dad doing something agricultural (tillaging, I think he said), while Jess and I went to my house for banana splits and iced coffee on the terrace. Yes, I know that sounds pretentious, but it is slightly raised above the rest of the garden and too narrow for a patio, and a deck would be planked - so terrace it must be. Helen rang while we were preparing these to say that she was home, but Jess decided there was no need to rush, so we had a pleasant twenty minutes of relaxation and refreshment.

They moved our gas tank today.

It has sat in the same position for longer than we have lived here (21 years) without causing any trouble. Actually, I'm telling a bit of a fib because Calor replaced it about ten years ago, but in the same place that it had always been. Then, before Christmas, they told us that because you cannot walk all round it to inspect it the tank could no longer be passed as safe. We pointed out that you can walk all round it, you just have to go up the steps onto the back lawn in order to look down at the back, but apparently that wasn't good enough. What they wanted to do was to put it (at our expense) up on the lawn bang in the middle of the view. I negotiated - my father who was at a council meeting at the time might have been a bit surprised at my pleading on behalf of my poor old pensioner father - and the result was that they agreed simply to turn the tank around, taking it out of its neat little niche and bringing it forward so that some jack-in-office can stand in the niche instead to admire its back which was formerly the front, and that they would pay for the move as long as we provided the concrete plinth on which it would stand. So we did that by their deadline which was January 23rd, and today they came to turn it round, and here they are doing that.

That accomplished, I hung the washing out. Then I typed up no.2 nephew's college assignment called "The Structure and Function of the Endocrine System in Relation to Homeostasis" which was full of words that I had to copy out letter by letter as I had never heard of them before, which is a much longer process than typing something you understand - particularly when you remember than Jacob is dyslexic and his mother who had helped write up his notes may be a nurse, but has handwriting which clearly suggests ambitions to be a doctor.

I once decided that Hell would be spending eternity shopping in an unknown supermarket arranged by a very tall man with no sense of order or logic with a shopping list written by a dyslexic doctor while the tannoy system plays highly amplified jingly versions of sacred music by Handel and Bach.

This, at times, came close. I am a WONDERFUL aunt, though I says it as shouldn't.

This evening it was our Reading Club. Highest attendance ever, and unanimous approval of the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. Four members of the group had experience of autism through working with special needs children, I have both a nephew and a godson who are 'on the autism spectrum' though thankfully only just, and two or three others had dealt with autistic children in the normal course of classroom teaching, so we had a quite a lively discussion - including Joe's contribution about what it is like from the inside.

Don't some people make you sick.

Josh saved up to buy himself a Harris Hawk which he loved. Then one day he went to her mews to find her dying of what turned out to be a vitamin deficiency caused by poor feeding when she was a chick.

He saved again to buy a new hawk and he had one all lined up. He was going all the way to Preston with his hawking mentors to fetch the hawk on Sunday. This was all arranged and he had collected the cash today to take with him.

I will quote from the email sent by Shane (the person selling the hawk) on March 16th.

"Hi josh
thanks for your e mail . . . its great that a young man feels ready to take up falconry, it might be a great idea that you could bring your mentor with you so you will feel more at ease. although i am an honest man and can only be happy to assist you in your visit/purchase of your hawk. . . 25th march is fine for me. i will hold her for you.regards shane."

Today he received an email out of the blue saying that he couldn't wait any longer and had a cash buyer coming this evening! What a bastard!

There have been two days of snow this year.

On each occasion I have been driving to do an outreach at a village school in the wilds of Lincolnshire.

Infamy, infamay - they've all got it in for me! I am now totally paranoid and have changed my name to Marvin.

I have been feeling grotty all week.

It started a week ago with a sudden attack of sickness and diarrhoea the details of which are not fit for publication. Suffice to say that it ran and ran from Saturday evening and all day Sunday, and I didn't dare leave the house to go to church. I understand it is best just to let these things run, which is just as well since the diarrhoea tablets had a use-by date in 1989. We are not a family given to tummy upsets.

On Monday I made the decision to go into work as it was a meeting with no child contact or, for me, personal responsibility. In fact, any input from me beyond sitting and looking vaguely intelligent was entirely optional; I think I just about passed muster.

Having survived Monday there seemed no reason not to go in for Tuesday. Invaders and Settlers (Saxons) in the morning and Living with the Land (Victorian farming and farm labourers' families) in the afternoon. The former was for me the first time with this workshop in over a year so there was no dong it on automatic pilot, but in the afternoon I was shadowing Hilary prior to doing this particular workshop for the first time on Thursday. The morning took it out of me, and my lunch did not stay down, Thank goodness I was only watching in the afternoon.

Wednesday I was back to watching daytime television in front of the fire, and avoiding food.

Thursday I felt much better again so I went to work and taught the Victorian School in the morning, and Living with the Land in the afternoon. It all went quite well.

Friday, still feeling a bit grotty, but I took my car in for her first MOT in the afternoon and did the shopping while I waited, and waited, and waited. OK, so they needed to replace a tire in order for her to pass, but 40/45 minutes is the time for an MOT; why the extra hour? It takes under 10 seconds to change 4 tires and refuel in a Grand Prix pit stop, and either Jake or Josh on his own can change a wheel in under 10 minutes without the advantages of a fully equipped garage. It's a mystery.

Saturday. Got up and realised that a) I felt better and b) I felt hungry for the first time in a week.

And now it's Sunday. Our service is this afternoon at 4.30 - Communion, Baptism and Mothering Sunday Service all rolled into one. In the meantime I have prepared the wherewithal for roast beef which I will put in the oven in about an hour. It doesn't feel right hanging about at home on a Sunday morning.

Every now and again we get a negative comment on the evaluation sheets we give to teachers at the end of each workshop, and occasionally these comments are about the difficulty of language or ideas.

Ours are for the most part historic workshops, and quite a few involve role play. We tend to stick to simple formal language avoiding, for example, both the pitfalls of a modern, slangy 'me mam 'n' dad' and the old fashioned 'mama and papa' or 'mater and pater' (which is what my maternal grandmother called her parents) by saying mother and father. Obviously when using terms like archaeology we check that the children understand what we are talking about usually by asking the child with the most confidently raised hand to explain to the rest of the class.

Some things cannot be changed. For example one of Florence Nightingale's small nurses at Scutari has to read the 23rd psalm to a dying soldier. In 1854 she cannot read from the NEB, Good News or any other modern English version of the Bible; so what she is given (sent in advance so the teacher can choose and rehearse a suitable reader) a shortened version from the King James Bible. As another example in "Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's Washday" we read from Beatrix Potter's stories. Not the simplified Ladybird versions!

Mostly all this is well received by both teachers and children, but, as I said, occasionally there is one who complains that the language should be simplified for the benefit of the children.

Does it really matter if every child does not understand every word? Isn't hearing new things how we learn? So long as the whole of the workshop is enjoyed by the majority, isn't it a good idea to challenge all the children just a bit? Isn't it insulting to the children to simplify too far? Are teachers who want over simplification just lazy teachers?

While on the subject of language and vocabulary, what about this idea of making a foreign language compulsory from year 3? In theory that's a good start, but wouldn't Reception be even more receptive? And the other thing that bothers me is that people like myself with 'O' level French (only just, and many years in the past) would be the ones responsible for teaching these languages. I always think of the Nun in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales who spoke French in the manner of Stratford atte Bow. Is this such a good idea?

Maybe a better route would be to get children used to the idea that speaking more than one language can be easy and fun by having parents and teachers' assistants who would talk to and with the children in other languages. Small children might not even be aware whether they are speaking Punjabi, Mandarin or German, or a mixture of all three, but wouldn't they be acquiring the right flexibility of mind and tongue to set them in good stead later on?

Thoughts please.

Today UK TV History is showing a full day of "Who do you think you are?". I have seen them all before and will watch some of them again today, but the thing that strikes me forcibly is that everyone seems to have had ancestors who were grindingly poor, and many of them ancestors who were distinctly aristocratic.

Mine weren't.

That any family in all directions in four countries can have remained so firmly ensconced in the lower middle and (highly respectable) upper working classes for so many generations is almost beyond belief. Yet there they are great grand-fathers - Fish Merchant, Master Cabinet Maker, Civil Engineer and Vicar.

Going back another generation we stay with fish merchant, no fewer than three grocers from one with a little corner shop to one who could style himself 'merchant' and send his sons to public school and university, coal-mine owner, fisherman and farmer, miller, and various master and journeyman tradesmen. Heading back towards the eighteenth century (we haven't reached it yet) there are more fishermen and more tradesmen (still mainly working for themselves), and fewer grammar school boys, but still a high level of respectability with a range of Methodist lay preachers and Anglican churchwardens, and a certain amount of money judging by the houses they built and the wills they left. Heading backwards through time we find no paupers or prisoners, and come to that no servants, no factory workers, no miners, and precious few farm labourers. Equally there are no land-owners, no aristocrats, no great industrial wealth, nobody who has so much as styled himself a gentleman since the seventeenth century. Just that solid range of respectable working man to comfortable middle-class. And hardly a whiff of a black sheep unless you count one young man who incurred his father's displeasure by taking his fishing boat out on a Sunday! Oh yes, and a strong tendency for both men and women to reach their three score and ten, which, among other things, suggests consistently adequate diet.

There's a bit of me that would rather like all the as yet unfollowed lines to continue in this thoroughly respectable if somewhat dull vein, but there is another part that wants my Irish Johnstone forebears to be descended from a gloriously rowdy line of Scottish Border Reivers. I have a suspicion that if we could trace back accurately to the vikings, my ancestors would have been the ones who landed, shook hands with the local celtic or saxon chief, and married his daughter having converted to christianity in order to please his new in-laws. No, probably not the chief's/thane's/whatever's daughter, but that of his highly respectable bailiff, factor, reeve . . .

On Thursday I had a long day doing a museum outreach workshop at an infant school near Doncaster - very pleasant, well organised, nice children, well prepared, friendly teachers - just a very early start and motorway driving which I don't like at all.

While I was driving a light came on on my dashboard which I had never seen while in motion before - a red exclamation mark in brackets.

"Hey-oop" I thought (being in Yorkshire at the time) "what's this?" So as soon as it was safe and legal to do so I stopped and had a look in the owners handbook.

"Brake Warning Light" it told me, and sent me to page 121 where I was told to stop immediately and contact my nearest Toyota dealer. So I rang my father who told me to nurse the car home.

I now know that my car was busy leaking brake fluid and that my brakes could have failed at any time.

Fortunately Margaret had suggested a non-motorway route home by which she had come and which would take me back into Scunthorpe where I could leave all the Florence Nightingale stuff at the museum en route for home, so nobody hooted at me or tried to climb into my boot for driving comfortably under the speed limit.

Knowing that I would be late I had bought two Morrisons 'Finest' seafood dishes which Pa and I could just do in the microwave. Suffice to say I should have known better. If I didn't feel like cooking, beans on toast would have been preferable.

So Pa went out to his meeting (reason for quick food) and Jacob came along and drove the car up to the farm where he and his cousin could have a proper look at it. Roger was so alarmed by what he saw that he wouldn't let Jacob drive back the half mile, but brought him back to collect his own car and to explain why my car was stopping the night at Roger's.

In the morning we phoned the Toyota dealer. They sent a break-down chap with a trailer to collect the car on the understanding that I would have to pay if the car had suffered accidental damage rather than a failure. Fingers crossed time, and hasty arrangements for cover at work next week in case I am transportless. At this point what Jacob and Roger told me has led me to believe that it might need a major replacement of the braking system. Fortunately Damien, the Toyota mechanic, is able to find and repair the leak. He tells me that he personally has never seen this particular failure before and that we are pretty well in rocking horse shit territory with it - not difficult to deal with, but virtually unknown.

Anyway everything is done under warranty, so nothing to pay. And we are back to plan A with work.

In three weeks time my car celebrates her third birthday, and if it had happened after that it would have cost me a small fortune. So I am now going to book her in for her first MOT just a little early so that anything they pick up can be dealt with under that same warranty.

Today's sermon was based on the Gospel reading for this second Sunday in Lent (Luke 13.31-35): in it Jesus refers to Herod as a fox and likens himself to a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wings.

The sermon was fine, but in it Ian, who claims that with 3 hens in the vicarage garden he is the second biggest poultry farmer in the street, used the phrase "If a chicken had teeth and a brain . . ." For some reason this image got to both Joe and me and, glancing at each other, we almost had an unseemly fit of the giggles in church. Afterwards it inspired me to create this picture . . .

But at least it proves I was listening, and I do take notice.

I have just come in from watching the lunar eclipse. We are lucky here well away from any street lights so that we get the real beauty of the night sky, and tonight there is no cloud. There was also a bonus: about ten minutes before the eclipse became complete I saw a 'falling star'.

I wanted to take a photo, but my little camera wasn't up to the job - or I wasn't: I got several pictures of unrelieved blackness and one of the clothes line - a bright blue streak across the blackness which left me confused for several seconds on first viewing the lamentable results of my photographic efforts!

On August 11th 1999 I took 11 year old Jacob, 8 year old Joshua and 5 year old Jessica to Lincoln for the day. We were too far north for the total solar eclipse, but we actually had the best of it as the south west (where the eclipse was total) had heavy cloud cover, while it was relatively clear over Lincolnshire. It seemed a good idea to watch what there was from the top of the Observatory Tower of Lincoln Castle. We weren't the only people with this bright idea and the 20 or so people there made it more of an event than it would have been watching from the garden at home. That evening we also discovered that we had been filmed from a distance and caught a fleeting glimpse of ourselves (wholly unrecognisable) on the local television news as part of their eclipse coverage. It is a strange thought that of all those people only Jessica and, perhaps, Joshua have an anything like realistic hope of witnessing the next total eclipse over Britain on September 23rd 2090.

Yesterday we took the KS1 Historic Toys Outreach to a brand new, ecologically sound primary school - so new that it has not yet had its official opening and the grounds are still un-turfed.

Inside it has to be said that the school is beautiful - all finished in beautiful blonde hardwoods (presumably from sustainable sources) with wide carpeted corridors and staff lavatories that don't double as store cupboards. It has a turf roof (sedums, I believe, rather than grass), ground-source heating, and there is plenty of room in the car park for both staff and visitors.

The school while still under construction

The staff were pleasant, and the children were well behaved and responsive.

In short, a perfect school.

And yet, the place left me with a vague feeling of unease. In the rooms we were in (hall and staffroom) the windows were tiny and unopenable so that even on a bright day there was hardly any natural light, and the underfloor heating made the place uncomfortably hot (yes, I know I complain about excessive heat whenever it approaches 70F, but it wasn't just me complaining) and the only way to alleviate the heat was to turn on roof vents which made a noise like a distant motorway. The external doors and some of the internal doors had electronic locks - some operated by switches next to the door and some by beepers carried by the staff. I have never been a fan of either closed windows or locked doors, and personally I am more concerned about the safe and rapid evacuation of the children in the case of a fire alarm than by remote chance of an attack by a mad gunman. At the moment the head is so precious about the beautiful, blonde hardwood floor in the hall that the children were not allowed to bowl hoops, ride hobby horses or scooters, run pull-along toys or wear shoes on it, which rather defeats the object of the workshop. (Thank goodness that when I dressed in the morning I decided on trainers rather than smart shoes for a full day on my feet.) Fortunately a combination of gym mats and being able to take the children out into a carpeted corridor alleviated most of the problem. Will the head become more relaxed about his floor once the bigwigs have been and gone for the official opening?

In the hall we also learned that the school has a serious design defect. The school is built around a quadrangle so that the hall is effectively the only route from the administrative corridor to some of the classrooms and the storeage area, so we were constantly being interrupted by people apologising for interrupting us as they walked through.

The school is also at the end of a road in an as yet unfinished industrial estate. I understand that they are going to run a safe footpath/cyclepath through so the children will not forever have to brave the lorries.

William Wilberforce is an historic figure whom I admire enormously. He is one of those rare people who genuinely achieved a lasting good.

Of course, like most people who achieved something important, he was part of a movement - the one who for whatever reason gave his name to history while others with less influence, less charisma, less single-mindedness are forgotten. Without William Wilberforce the banning of slavery would have taken longer, but it would nonetheless have happened. As would women's suffrage without the Pankhursts, the nursing profession without Florence Nightingale, antiseptics without Joseph Lister . . .

So why am I seeking to belittle somebody whom I admire in the year which marks the 200th anniversary of hi great achievement?

Well, I'm not. He did something truly great.

Today marchers wearing yokes and chains set off from Wilberforce's house in Hull on a 250-mile trek to arrive in London on March 25th to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade.

One of the marchers said Britain's history as one of Europe's leading slave-trading nations is “a scar on our nation that we have not dealt with. Foremost we want to bring about an apology from Britain and Europe and the slave trading nations, saying sorry for our involvement in that,”

I have no doubt of the good intentions of these people, but the idea of modern Britain apologising for the slave trade is ridiculous.

Slavery is millennia old - as old as humanity - and, just a Wilberforce's achievment was part of a much bigger movement for good, so the Africa Trade, despite its industrial scale, was only a small part of a worldwide evil.

At the time it was abolished in Britain, bonded servitude (which is only slavery under a different name) was being practised across Europe: yes, even in Britain there were, for example, Scottish miners who were slaves in all but name, and there continued to be for many years after slavery was outlawed.

Britain was only one part of the African slave trade. It was practised by African against African, by Arab traders, by tribal chiefs, by the rich, by the powerful, by anyone who wanted to get rid of someone or to make a quick buck. Long before British traders became involved slavery was a fact of life in Africa - as it was thoughout the world and throughout history.

Many years ago my mother was teaching a group which included two boys - one African and one of West Indian origin. Something in the play they were reading set the West Indian boy off on a bit of a tirade about the slave trade for which he blamed the British. Everyone listened politely, most of the 28 or so white children in the group agreeing with him. When, at last, he had talked himself to a halt, the African boy nodded sagely and said, "My granddad, the Chief, always said it was a very good way of getting rid of trouble-makers . . . like you."

Now, obviously this was just a bit of repartee by a bright, witty child in his middle teens, but it does illustrate the point that the history of slavery is not a simple issue of the white British exploiting and enslaving the black African. It was and is a whole lot more complex than that.

Who should apologise to whom for what our ancestors did? If we in Britain apologise to . . . well, to whom do we apologise? To the Africans? No, their ancestors, if they were involved at all, were as guilty as we in the slave trade - they are descended from the ones who were not enslaved, at least not as part of the British Africa Trade. To the West Indians? In that case they must also remember to apologise to themselves since most West Indians are descended from the white slavers as well as the black slaves.

That we should mark the bi-centenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain is good. That we should especially remember William Wilberforce is also good. That the marking of this anniversary should make us think of the evil that was - and still is - slavery is very important.

That two hundred years on from being the first globally powerful nation to abolish slavery, we should be the one nation to make a public apology for enslaving people is frankly as ridiculous as it is pointless. Let Italy apologise to the Christians of the world for the Roman persecution of Christians, because it makes about as much sense!

As I said in my previous blog, history happened. History may be responsible for us, but we are not responsible for history. Responsible to history in that we can learn from the past and take care of it's achievements (both physical and moral), but not to make some vague and undirected apology for something which happened long before any of us were born.

I received a phonecall today from a lady who, long ago before the war, was baptised in Swallow.

As churchwarden and local historian I get quite a few such phonecalls/emails wanting to check dates and so on. I like doing that kind of thing and have trancripts of all the extant registers, the censuses from 1841 to 1901, lots of old photographs (not actually mine - the village archive), historic maps, enclosure maps, archaeological maps, and notes made from the school log book, various local directories, the archived Yarbrough documents, etc. etc.

This lady's request was different. She changed her religion 25 years ago, and has now decided that she wants the record of her baptism deleted from the parish registers. I explained that I cannot do that.
a) I haven't got the original register - it is in the archive in Lincoln.
b) Even if I had got it, church registers are legal documents which may not be altered. (I would probably be breaking the law if I altered any record after it has been signed by the officiating priest.)
c) Annual returns (historically the Bishops' Transcripts) are made to the diocese - these are also legal documents.
d) Whatever her current views, her baptism is an historic fact which cannot be changed by altering records. History is full of things we don't like - wars, executions, slavery, massacres, child labour . . . they happened, and we can't alter that.
e) The church of England isn't a club. The baptism didn't make her specifically a member of Holy Trinity Church, Swallow: it welcomed her into God's family - a family to which she still belongs albeit on a different - and, to my way of thinking, rather odd - branch.

As I said - nowt so strange as folks.