After my holiday and then half-term, I am back at work and have spent the week variously as a Victorian schoolmarm, a history detective, an archaeologist, an Egyptian priest and Florence Nightingale - never say that my life lacks variety! (Fortunately for me only the first and last are full costume role play.)

Tuesday it was siling down with rain (does the rest of the country use the verb 'to sile' or does it prefer 'to pour'?) and my Grimsby school arrived rather late. Mind you, that day they were the lucky ones - Dianne and Sharon had outdoor workshps with their poor, drenched babes (almost literally babies in Dianne's case as they were a nursery class) - at least mine were indoors. On the other hand the two workshops are very verbal, and St. Mary's is an RC school and in this class 25% of the pupils were Polish - one of them brand new to this country. Calling the register in the Victorian classroom was fun with the combination of 8 point print and all those Polish names! Life was made more difficult by the fact that the teacher had not been on a pre-visit and had only just been given the teacher's pack by the school office and thus had not done the preparation required. Fortunately the children were both good and resourceful and the teacher sensible so we managed very well.

Dianne's babies were also from a catholic school with a high proportion of Polish children new to the English language and not yet familiar with the works of Beatrix Potter. She says that she made the whole thing as visual as she could, but with rain and language diffculties it can't have been easy for her doing the workshop on her own for the first time.

Wednesday - Egyptians - and to a school where the headmaster used to be head where Jess and Josh were at primary school. On hearing that I was going to see Mr. Travis, Jess told me that I had to tell him that she now weighed 20 stone, had cropped her hair, dyed it purple, had 17 facial piercings and a tatoo, and had been expelled from school. This I duly relayed. "Not changed then?" said Alan Travis, "Still got her sense of humour." He clearly knows our Jess pretty well. The children suggested that I should mummify Mr. Travis instead of Vic-Ramses, but he had to get off to a rugby match so we decided against it. They were a lovely lot - very interested, very lively (which is not a euphamism for naughty in this case).

Today I was at Our Lady of Lincoln school. It is so pleasant to have a class of children who all have the terms of reference for the idea of 'called by God', plus immediate recognition of the rosary handed to the dying soldier and understanding what a nun is when they ask where all the nurses who went to the Crimea came from - it must save the best part of five minutes of explanation and give place for some quality discussion - and believe me, children of 6 and 7 can quality discuss with the best of us. These particular children were so good that I slightly upped the level of vocabulary and content for them, and they coped brilliantly. You should have met 'Sister' Princess (yes, really!) who ordered about the orderlies so convincingly and 'Trooper' Wilson who died of his wounds rather more dramatically than is usual, and when the role play ended came back to life with equal drama!

Having lost my source of my favourite breakfast cereal 'Force' from Proudfoot's in Barton which has sold out to Tesco, I called in at Waitrose in Lincoln on my way home and collected three packets, plus the rest of my weekend grocery shopping which gives me a full day to catch up on housework tomorrow (or lounge about in the sun if that is how the mood takes me).