Clarissa et al.

When he prescribed the anti-biotics and steroids, the doctor also told me to take paracetemol. Today, having nearly finished the pack I bought at the surgery and somewhat tired of my father's inability to follow detailed instructions on a shopping list, I braved the supermarket, and picked up 4 packs of 16 paracetemol and a lemon cold remedy - this last for Joe who has come down with a stinking cold (as has father) and actually believes these work.

I got to the check out and was told that only two packs containing analgesics per person were allowed. "I am shopping for three people, and the doctor said to get paracetemol. What is more I have been allowed this many before in this supermarket." It cut no ice. I burst into tears (not intentionally, but I was feeling dreadful and this was just the last straw), but with no result.

In the end I took two packs of paracetemol, and they took back the other packs. Then I went and parked my trolley in the cubbyholes by the cafe, collected another pack of paracetemol and the lemon stuff, and took them through the handbaskets only checkout.

I know the law was changed to stop would-be suicides, but honestly just 4 days' supply for one person with flu/toothache/chicken-pox etc. or one day's supply for a family cold seems a bit daft! My normal consumption of paracetemol is about two tablets a year - in the old days a bottle of 100 would last the whole family for years and years. We really ought to be allowed to take responsibility for ourselves before our Nanny State (terrified of worst case scenarios) legislates all of us into permanent childhood!

Earlier this week I gave father a shopping list which described exactly the fruit juices I wanted - squeezed orange with juicy bits (50p off if you buy 2) from the chill counter next to the milk, and bog standard apple juice from the shelves next to the cereal. He came back with 2 smooth orange from concentrate and one pineapple from the chill counter (on the 3 for 2 offer). I also asked for thick sliced wholemeal bread, so he bought unsliced granary. Mind you, he did manage to pick out some excellent ham at the deli counter. I have now recitfied the fruit juice situation.

I see another example of this attitude of treating everyone as children is given on http://grumpy.blog.co.uk/2007/12/02/verboten~3381871 today

This time last year on my blog I mentioned pink fluffy towels and was given them fivefold. I also got the paella and the casseroles.

This year I shall mention the £200,000 I really need in the hope (but not expectation) of the same result.

More realistically, maybe this will be the year that nobody gives me scented candles, soft-centred milk chocolates or sweet, fizzy wine - all of which I loathe, and have to redistribute among my nephews and niece.

I finished the steroids on Friday and the antibiotics yesterday, which is normally the start of feeling well again. Instead, I still feel absolutely bloody! And I have run out of paracetemol and my temperature is back up again.

All the schools I was supposed to visit last week have been very understanding - one has booked for December 3rd and the rest are willing to wait until I'm ready. I've got to feel better soon. I can't stand much more television, and Bill Bryson's childhood will only last so long. I've written a short story (posted on my Verse and Worse blog), but my brain is so mushy that it is probably complete rubbish.

And only one friend has been to see me - bringing books, thank goodness!

I have been pretty sleepy with not being well, and most evenings have dozed off on the sofa by about 7.30 so that any television or reading has been purely theoretical.

Tonight I made the mistake of actually staying awake. Honourable mentions for Crouch and Beckham, but all I can really say is that I enjoyed Top Gear.

Friday was a pretty horrendous day at work. It started OK, but deteriorated rapidly.

I'm afraid that somebody ballsed up big time with the booking - that I am morally certain that it was the school rather than the museum will probably not cut any ice when it comes to grovelling as 'the customer is always right'.

The original booking, I believe, was schoolroom for both groups and Lauren taking the younger class for laundry in the morning and the older ones for History Detectives in the afternoon. Then they discovered that the children had already done History Detectives so they changed to the housekeeper's tour with Sarah taking over from Lauren.

So far, so (apparently) straightforward. And that is how Lauren and I took it this morning with me taking the years 5 & 6 to the hall for schoolroom and Lauren taking the years 3 & 4 to the laundry. All went well except that Lauren says the clearing up was pretty horrendous as they had muddled all the stuff up in the back room and removed several of the coloured ribbons with which we identify which basket/corner clothes belong in. My group was lovely.

They had their lunch. We had our lunch. Sarah and I were ready for our groups which both arrived expecting to do Domestic Staff! We showed them our week ahead sheets which clearly said Years 5 & 6 Domestic Staff, Years 3 & 4 Eyes to the Front. This was not, we were told, what they had booked, and several of their younger ones had learning difficulties which would make the level of role play very difficult for them in the schoolroom.

Sarah and I had a brief confab and offered the alternative of Sarah doing the standard introduction for Domestic Staff to both groups and then I would take one group upstairs to show them the chandelier, landing and Sir Berkeley's bedroom, while Sarah started in the drawing room as usual, then I would follow round once she had done those. By this time, however, the teacher had resigned herself to Eyes to the Front so I did a version in which I eased up considerably on the discipline and with a very simple introduction.

The children weren't prepared for this, but it went pretty well all things considered and nobody burst into tears or refused to join in, and even the child with aspergers volunteered an couple of answers.

When they were leaving one of the teachers asked about the gift bags they had ordered. There was nothing on our sheets. Stuart rang the shop and they didn't know anything either. I suggested that, since she had the money on her, the teacher might like to go in and get a load of pencils and rubbers etc to distribute, but she felt that there wasn't time. So she'll be in touch with the museum early next week.

Going back to the morning, no room was listed for lunch so Lauren and I put them in PER2. When I went to clear up at the end of the afternoon I found that they had not only left rubbish under all the seats, but also an overflowing and open bin. To make matters worse they had left the door open and a peacock had got in and thrown the rubbish about: at least I'm assuming that's what had happened - there was a peacock and rubbish strewn around the bin, and if it wasn't the peacock then this school wins the termly prize for most disgusting PER. Despite the fact that they left quite early I am claiming an extra half hour for cleaning up - Sarah can verify that I was the best part of an hour doing it.

The really odd thing is that one of the teachers used to be an Museum EA up to about 5 years ago and should have known all the ins and outs. If she had just asked in the morning how it was that neither group was starting with Domestic Staff either Sarah or I could have done that with the older children, and then I could have had them for schoolroom in the afternoon while Sarah took the little ones for Domestic Staff.

Anyway, as I said, I suspect the muddle was the school's, and I think Sarah and I managed pretty well with damage limitation if they decide to blame the museum for the mix up, but there may have to be some soothing of ruffled feathers anyway.

I got in much later than anticipated, and sat down to write all this in an email for Vicky so that she was forewarned when the phonecall comes, and found I was shivering uncontrollably and my teeth were chattering. By mid evening I was gasping for breath and my side was aching. I spent most of yesterday asleep, but today I realised that I couldn't wait for the doctor's surgery to open on Monday so I rang the out of hours service, and have just now come back from the hospital (via the Asda pharmacy) with pleurisy, steroids, strong antibiotics and strict instructions not to go into work for at least a week. This coming week was four outreaches of Florence Nightigale and Egyptians which as bad luck would have it I am the only EA who really knows them, and any substitute will be fumbling with workshps observed but not yet learned.

At work we have a combination of a busy week and two people away on holiday. Not that I'm complaining - the wet summer brought too many cancelled workshops and thus less money to those of us working in museum education.

Today we had a city school which I have previously found to be reasonably well behaved and hard working. As I have remarked before, what a difference a teacher can make! Today they were an undisciplined rabble! Admittedly their own class teacher was absent, and the teacher in charge of them knew only a few of the children from teaching them maths, but children who don't pay attention, wander around when they are supposed to be working or listening, and talk when other people are speaking tend to have acquired such behaviour over longer than a few days or weeks.

One of the adult 'helpers' was so much use that she couldn't distinguish between cottage and cobbler. The clue is "Go to the cobbler's workshop and find something Anne has left there to be mended". Her group brought down a frilly waitress apron dating from the 1930s which is left as a red herring on the cottage clothes line to confuse those children collecting Victorian pinafores for their 1881 character instead of a pair of clogs from the cobbler's shop! "I thought it couldn't be right" she said, "but there wasn't anything else there." How many times do I need to say "Ask me; that's what I'm here for."

Yesterday's (Tuesday) school from a largish village had a vast number of children with very obvious special needs (including Downs syndrome) yet coped well and behaved beautifully. Can it just be the difference between a city school and a country school?

Thursday
Another country school - KS1 this time - mainly little angels although there were a couple of little boys who had to be warned quite sternly not to touch the mangle until they were told to do so. Yes, I know, I was helping mummy with the mangling by the time I was three, and so were most people my age and older and we all have all our fingers, but nowadays we have health and safety - plus, of course, the fact that most children have never seen a mangle before and don't know about being careful. On the other hand is it going too far that the children aren't supposed to open the desks in the schoolroom lest they drop the lids on their fingers? There are days when I think longingly of the days when teachers would slam those lids down on the fingers of naughty children. I think yesterday's teacher was somewhat of that mind by the end of the day: he spoke with a certain nostalgia about the cane.

Hilary was telling me on Thursday that they have just added the latest name to the War Memorial in Scunthorpe - a boy who went through school with her son, Richard, and who was killed in Iraq earlier this year.

In Swallow at 11 o'clock today we held our annual Remembrance Service at our War Memorial on which are just three names - all from the Great War. On this occasion young Brendan (16), who is in the cadets, laid the wreath accompanied by his sergeant while Tom (13 this week) tolled the church bell 11 times. Brendan is just three years younger than the young officer, son of the Rector, whose name heads the short list of names, and already older than he would have been when the war started. My natural response is always 'what a needless waste', and I think of the words of a young officer in the same regiment as my grandfather, of the same rank, born in the same year and of a similar social background.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

And then I think of an even more cruel waste a quarter of a century later. I watched a television play the other week about the relief of Belsen. My uncle, my father's brother, was one of the first soldiers into that camp. Another uncle, my mother's brother, was a young doctor with the British forces working in Germany in the aftermath of the war - I don't know where, but as a pediatrician his work would have been with the most innocent victims of all.

What happened in Germany under the nazis probably comes as close as anything in the history of mankind to justifying war, though it was not the reason given at the time, but in that war as in others even to the present day, it is right that we remember those who died or were injured in the service of their country whatever our feelings of righteous indignation against those politicians who bring those wars about.

Today's ceremony was beautifully led by Bob Davies who lives in the village and was formerly with the Mission to Seamen. We have a service sheet with the briefest of ceremonies which in most years has preceded a dash to Croxby for the regular communion service, delayed by twenty minutes or so to accomodate Swallow's Cenotaph ceremony.

This year our regular pattern of services has been changed because of the interregnum and Bob expanded the service to include two readings - one from Psalms and the Beatitudes - plus a short talk and getting us to sing O God Our Help in Ages Past as well as the National Anthem, which we always sing. Bob has always been a great asset as one of the people who read the lesson with his huge enthusiasm and sincerity making even the most difficult Old Testament reading immediate and new, and he brought this to today's ceremony giving something which no priest in my memory has quite achieved.

Let us remember before God, and commend to his sure keeping:
those who have died for their country in war;
those whom we knew and whose memory we treasure;
and all who have lived and died in the service of mankind.

Lieutenant CECIL WALTER HENRY ASKEY
8th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment
Who died in the Great War, aged 19 on 5th April 1918
The son of the Rev’d A.H.Askey and Mrs. Askey

Gunner WALTER DAY (821200)
"B" Battery. 155th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery
Who died in the Great War on 25th September 1918
The husband of Charlotte Day and father of Cyril Walter Day

Stoker KERDON WILKIN (297698)
H.M.S. "Coquette."
Who died in the Great War aged 33 on 7th March 1916
Born 1883, the son of Thomas William and Sarah Wilkin

We will remember them.

There are days which seem longer than others - sometime for no apparent reason. Today's children were lovely. The school arrived on time. The teachers were fully prepared. The rain just about held off. We had pretty nearly our full time for lunch. The afternoon brought a whistle-stop tour from a councillor wanting to find out what goes on in museum education (the first such vist anyone can remember). Nothing scary, and the children had been forewarned that we would have extra visitors to the Victorian classroom, so I told them to stand up and greet our visitors who watched drill and reading before they went on their way. Sadly one young lady - whether through nerves, or illness, or just because she hadn't remembered to go at lunchtime - had an accident while our visitors were there and had to be surreptitiously hurried out by one of the teacher's helpers. Poor child - so embarrassing, especially when you are eight years old.

Musically it was quite interesting to compare the two classes. We always sing All Things Bright and Beautiful (How I hate that hymn!). In the morning the school launched into the tune Royal Oak 1915 by Martin Shaw. In the afternoon a teacher who knew what was historically correct, but clearly couldn't sing, had attempted to teach them the original W H Monk version but had replaced all the notes higher than her limited compass with lower ones (usually a repeat of the previous note): after the first refrain the children gave up and reverted to what was obviously the school's customary rendition and sang the Shaw.

I had an Egyptian outreach yesterday, so today I had to take all the stuff back to the museum after I had finished today's teaching and had cleared up afterwards. I remain absolutely scandalised by how much food children throw away, and how much packaging their lunches come wrapped in. We adults will occasionally have a wrapped biscuit or a small piece of clingfilm round our cake, but we use and re-use margarine boxes and similar theoretical disposables from the supermarket, as well as proper tupperware.

Then I had to pop to the shop to get Pa's birthday dinner.

Anyway, it seemed a very long day made seemingly longer by having to drive home in the dark.

I'm off tomorrow and Monday, and plan to enjoy a nice, quiet weekend - if I can avoid an argument about the housework I haven't done and really don't want to do and would much rather leave until a later date . . .

The boys built a massive bonfire in the field behind our house, and last night they held the firework party. As the nearest dwelling I supplied the hot chocolate, while Joy and Tommy (parents of birthday boy William) brought fishcake and chips or sausage and chips for everyone. I believe that in total they bought around £200 worth of fireworks. I use the word 'worth' loosely: in my opinion setting fire to £200 is a shocking waste of money, though I have to say that for a private firework party, this was a very good display, and that Laurence did a very good job setting them off in rapid, but safe succession at a sensible distance from the watching crowd. (I'm using 'crowd' loosely too - about two dozen of us including four generations of Thompsons.)

It is quite hard taking photos of subjects you can't quite see in the dark. Anyway, here they are:-

Do I get the impression that birthday boys William (navy anorak - 5 on November 5th) and Callum (burgundy anorak - 11 on November 5th) are not that enthusiastic?

Just finished Pompeii by Robert Harris.

Just as good as I was told, and very much recommended with an interesting cast of characters clothing the known facts about the volcano.

Last summer we had a special Egyptian exhibition at the museum and I had a lot of school parties coming in to learn 'the secrets of the pharoahs' in which I taught them how to mummify a corpse. That particular workshop was specially designed to be delivered as an outreach once the exhibition was over, though I actually did it as such three times while the exhibition was on - once for a special school where the logistics of getting so many children with a variety of disabilities to the museum daunted the teachers (though I believe several of the children later brought their parents to the exhibition) and twice to schools where they couldn't/wouldn't raise the funds to pay for the bus to get them to the museum.

Despite the fact that the workshop has been on our books for over a year since, today was the first time I had been 'back in Egypt' since July 2006. Today Hilary and I went to Aby, a tiny village near Alford, where we taught the entire KS2 class of 11 girls and 3 boys aged 7 to 11. As is so often the case with these tiny schools, they were lovely.

Hilary, who hasn't done Egyptians before, talked to them about what museums are about, and then did the archaeology section where the children have a chance to handle and discuss local finds from the post-mediaeval right back to the late stone-age. They are then asked which they think match the period of Egyptian civilisation. This is essentially the same as what we do to put both Romans and Saxons in an archaeological context, which Hilary has been doing for years - in fact she taught me both these workshops.

At this point I take over with a look at three items (reproduction) taken from an Egyptian tomb which they examine as if they were archaeologists making drawings and listing details about materials, size and what they think the item is and why it would be in a tomb.

Then we move over to the climax of the workshop - they mummify Vic-ramses. I take them across to where the body is hidden under a cloth and build up the tension. Are they brave enough to prepare a dead body for mummification? Then I remove the cloth . . .

Here he is - as the children say 'a teddy mummy' - and the children love it.

One child is chosen to be the priest who cuts him open, and then we stone him to death for defiling the body. The children remove Vic-ramses' internal organs. Behind him are the canopic jars dedicated to Qenbensenuef, Duamutef, Imseti and Hapi into which his intestines, stomach, liver and lungs will be placed. His brain (a mere snot producer) is mushed up and thrown away.

Then we bandage him and suround him with some of the things he will need in the after-life. Beside Vic-ramses is his mirror so that he can put on his make-up and look good in the after-life, and two ushabti to work for him. He is protected by amulets in the shape of the Eye of Horus, the Knot of Isis and the Backbone of Osiris.

He has a golden pectoral. On his heart is a scarab to protect him when Anubis weighs his heart against a feather, so that he will not be found wanting and his heart thrown to the crocodile monster.

The discussion with which we conclude the workshop was the most wide-ranging I have ever presided over. We covered food, houses, irrigation, as well as the comparison with Britons of the same period. The question came up of whether they would like to be ancient Egyptians. Some were quite keen, but changed their minds when they realised that there was a much greater possibility of being a slave than a pharoah, and then there was the question of television, computers, and most of all chocolate. One boy none-the-less fancied being a boy pharoah if he could do just what he wanted and have absolute power. I said that he would have his own way in many things but would have to obey certain strict rules of behaviour. Such as? Well, not being able to choose who to marry; it would have to be a woman of equal and royal status - in fact it might well be his sister! This decided him: no amount of power was worth that, and his sister whole-heartedly agreed.

I'm doing this again at Killingholme next week.