Clarissa et al.

Now I have my study nice and tidy I am using my own computer more again instead of my father's, which has certain advantages including internet access.

I bought mine in 1997: it has Windows 95 and Microsoft Works, and you may think why bother? Well, I like it, and it still works very well, as well as having all my files on it, although many are duplicated to this computer. However, my old Epson stylus printer has given up the ghost, and modern printers have different jacks, I can't find one which will connect with my computer. and - with new printers starting at as little as £24 - I am not sure that I want to buy second hand with all the attendant problems used electronic goods bring.

There was hardly anyone at Swallow bookworms last night - a mixture of reasons nice and nasty - but discussion both there and during the last month suggests that not a soul liked the book, Black Swan Green by David Mitchell.

It was a book about teenage angst and bullying which brought in every stereotype of which the author could think. One member summed it up as "too many ideas, too little heart" which seem about to describe it. Someone suggested that it might have been written for young (teenage?) male readers, but our youngest male reader (23) - and the only male present last night - absolutely loathed it and didn't get more than about a tenth of the way through. He was not the only one who thought life too short to wade through such unpleasantness, though I was among those who stuck it out to the end. Whether we finished it or not, we all agreed that it was a thoroughly unpleasant, sloppily written book.

Next month we have Selected Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Uncle Alf as I prefer to call him based on some genealogical miscalculations by my great-grandfather (right surname, right place, wrong family).

How many people received communion yesterday, and how many found it strangely changed?

At Thoresway, we were given no options: we received the bread (wafer) and no wine. I know this has long been the practice in the Roman Catholic church, but to me the sharing of the Body and Blood is of fundamental importance.

At Great Limber they dipped the wafers in the wine rather than drinking from the common cup.

At Caistor apparently they were given the options: share, dip or bread only and left to make up their own minds.

Alcohol is a pretty good disinfectant, while silver - especially silver wiped over with linen - has almost magical properties of cleanliness. By all means give people a choice, but if kneeling close together, shaking hands (kissing?) as we pass the peace and again at the end of the service hasn't passed on any germs going, is taking a sip of fortified wine from a silver chalice going to increase the danger to any significant degree?

Later

I see from Rev Ruth's blog http://revruth.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/living-dangerously that Passing the Peace is also regarded as dangerous - nobody mentioned that at Thoresway or, I believe, Caistor or Limber.

Today's sermon took the form of the second of two talks about the work of the Children's Society - the first was the history and today's was a synopsis of a recent report A Good Childhood.

Rev Daphne told us a number of the findings about the lives of children in Britain today - some blindingly obvious, some interesting and one with which I take issue: Children today have more leisure than in the past.

Now, I am assuming (going on Daphne's synopsis as I have not read the report) that if the comparisons are to have any real validity a comparison of children's lives today they must be with those of their parents and grandparents, and that while the lives of the 'little slaves of industry' of the nineteenth century, juvenile servants, whole families working all the hours God sent on the land, and even those of wartime evacuees are interesting they are irrelevant as a comparison with lives of modern children. So I compare the leisure time of children today with that of my childhood.

Apart from a few country children attending grammar schools, the vast majority of children lived within a walk or a bike ride of school. This was time spent with friends exploring the back alleys of their town and finding the cheapest/best sweet shops. For much of my time at junior school my group of friends rode home on our (imaginary) horses, fording the great rivers that were the roads and having adventures along the way. Nowadays too often the journey home is a long car ride with questions about homework and 'how was it at school today?', or lengthy bus rides.

Similarly Brownies, Guides (or Cubs and Scouts, or Girls' and Boys' Brigade) were reached on foot or on bike, and involved leisurely journeys home with friends via the chippy ("Four penn'orth of chips and scraps, please"). Nowadays it again tends to be a journey in the car, and I think I am right in saying that far fewer children have the time or inclination to join these excellent organisations.

Some of us went to music or dance lessons - again mostly under our own steam - and, except in the immediate run up to an exam or festival, there was very little pressure and grade 5 would be reached sometime before your 'O' levels and grade 8 (if you got that far) when you were in the sixth form. Nowadays grade 5 seems to be taken around the transition from primary to secondary school. Sports teams and clubs also tended to be once weekly activities. Of course there were children with an exceptional talent (or children with parents who believed their child had an exceptional talent) who had to live and breathe their art or sport every hour they weren't in school, but they were very much the exception, while nowadays there seem to be so many children with classes scheduled for every evening plus all the hours of practising these activities entail.

And that is before we reach the subject of homework. When I was at school homework was one of the 'privileges' you gained when you went to grammar school. Children at secondary modern schools had little if any homework and primary school children had the odd multiplication table or spelling list to learn, and were actively discouraged from taking school books home. Nowadays children seen to have homework from infant school and many parents choose to send their children to intensive coaching in key subjects. Of course in my day there were far fewer exams: the 11+ (or Common Entrance), then five years later O levels (or CSE) and then A levels two years after that - no SATS, just the internal exams set by the school, or not as the case may be.

And then there were weekends: even allowing for Sunday School and tea with grandparents, there were hours and hours spent with friends at their houses, at the Rec, down the Boating Lake, out in the country - miles of paths to discover on foot and further miles of road to discover on our bikes.

Yes, we had jobs to do at home - washing up, cleaning our shoes, making our own beds etc. - but we arrived home to discover tea on the table rather than letting ourselves into an empty house and having to forage in the freezer. Breakfast was equally catered and we either came home to a cooked lunch or stayed at school for school dinner. Another job was going out on our bikes to collect weekend shopping (often pre-ordered from the butcher, baker and greengrocer) but there were no long hours being dragged round out of town superstores.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that every change has been for the worse - many things are either better or just different neither better nor worse - but it seems to me that with their more regimented lives children have much less free time for leisure than in the past.

Some bloggists frequently ask what other people think about blogging in general and their blogging in particular.

Most days I scan through what people on my friends list have written. As a general rule I read those by people who write when they feel moved to do so maybe once a day, once a week or even less frequently, but I only scan the titles of those by people who write lots of blogs every day.

Every now and again they run a series of public information films on television on the theme "Think Bike!". Along the sides of the road there are notices reminding motorbike riders to kill their speed rather than themselves (although Josh tells me that when they first appeared a lad at school with him came off his bike while trying to figure out what one of these signs actually meant).

Sometimes however motorcyclists have only their own stupidity to blame when they have accidents! Today on my way to do my shopping I stopped at the roundabout where the A46 and the A18 cross. I was in the left-hand lane intending to go straight on, and waiting for traffic from the right to pass by when a motorbike shot past me on the left and onto the roundabout. Mine is only a small car, but it isn't transparent and I very much doubt if he could see whether there was still traffic coming past on the roundabout, nor could he know for certain that I didn't intend to turn left straight across his path (I wasn't signalling, but then a lot of people don't whichever way they intend to go.) As I said, I was looking to my right for traffic on the roundabout and was aware of the lack of anything behind that could be seen in my right wing mirror.

So, I wasn't turning right, the traffic already on the roundabout was on the inner lane for turning right and the motorcyclist zoomed (and I mean zoomed) away unscathed: it was so much luck rather than judgement, but if any other driver on the roundabout had hit him they - we - would have been left with the guilt in our hearts and minds if not in law.

I have completed - well, almost - a great work! I have found the floor of the room above the porch which I sometimes laughingly call my study. Nearly all the papers are sorted, although some sections require a finer re-sort, and I have painted the walls at one end prior to moving the desk and painting the walls at the other end. I have taken all my faded old postcards down as a step towards achieving this. I'll miss them, but all the vivid colours of the original nineteenth century art they mostly represented have turned a strange greeny blue.

I have now stopped for a cup of coffee and a pot of cottage cheese to tide me over till dinner time. I would like to enjoy these in the garden, but a very noisy farm machine is going round and round the neighbouring field shooting out small stones and very hard peas as it goes which fall like hail where I want to sit - all of which adds up to making the garden a place too noisy, too dusty and too downright dangerous in which to take lunch.

Evening Update

Desk moved. Walls painted . . . except that there is some printer ink splashed on the wall where the desk used to be and though painted over it is clearly as persistant as nicotine and is already showing through!

Phrase just heard on television:

"Camping is like going on holiday, but without the pleasure".

Too true if my limited experience is anything to go by!

What was all that about?!?!?

Of course I dream. Most people do. I normally dream dreams clearly inspired by the people I know, the things that interest me, the book I am reading, the television I have watched. A bit jumbled at times, but clearly sourced to the realities of my life. Apart from the very occasional anxiety dream when I find myself sitting an exam for which I have not merely not revised but in a subject I have never studied or acting in an unknown play possibly stark naked, I don't have nightmares.

Last night's dream wasn't a nightmare, but it was seriously weird! I was playing cricket. I seem to have been the player-manager-captain of a rather poor amateur team which had found itself drawn in an international competition and was scheduled to play against national teams all over Europe.

I was the opening bowler and we were playing on a waterlogged pitch in Bruges - the ground was very small and surrounded by wooden buildings (pavillions?) and high fences on three sides and a canal on the fourth. The pitch became flooded during the course of the dream as rain stopped play. For some reason I started bowling with the practice balls (very manky greenish unbouncy tennis balls of the sort that the caretaker got off the roof and out of the gutters at school at the end of the summer term which shrank to the size of a golf ball as I held them). When I bowled I threw as hard as I could and the ball fell far short of the batsman and landed dead without bouncing on the wet pitch so that the game had to be stopped for me to be shown the correct international quality balls.

I have never played cricket in my life - I don't even know the rules properly - I don't even watch cricket on television. Once I was staying with friends and the menfolk were watching the very tight finish of an exciting international match (the Ashes, I think). Of course I wanted England to win and found myself drawn into the room together with my hostess to watch the final over; just before the final ball I said plaintively "I'm sorry, but I still don't get where the offside rule comes in": OK, so it was a wind-up and I do understand the offside rule (in football!), but it is a pretty fair indication of the level of my abysmal ignorance of cricket. Moreover I haven't visited Bruges since I was seven years old when we spent a whole day there while staying with relatives in Antwerp.

So what was it all about, and why was it so vivid and - on its own terms - so cogent?

I am starting the holiday witha massive tidy! We live in a five bedroom and one bathroom house, but two of the rooms are taken up with sewing and ironing, and historical research respectively. Actually 'historical research' is a bit pompous for what I do, but the room is buried under a sea of papers surrounding my enthusiasm for family, local, theatrical and nineteenth century social history.

I have completed the stage 1 tidy of this rooms with large boxes filled roughly with the categories above, plus a couple of 'miscellaneous' as well as two bags of paper salvage and one of mainly plastic rubbish.

Stage 2 will be taking each category and filing the contents of that box or basket.

Stage 3 will be re filing it and putting it away in some sort of logical order.

I have come across a huge envelope of obviously well-thumbed scripts for what appear to be educational programmes on creative writing. Are they my mother's work? Or the work of a friend or colleague? Either way the notes suggest that these are actual recording scripts which have been used. A mystery!

I am not quite convinced of the merits of belonging to a family which never ever throws anything away if there is even the remotest chance that it will come in some day. On the other hand, I may end up single handedly dressing the display for the museum's autumn exhibition "Absolutely Prefab" with my large quantities of 1940s, 1950s and 1960s ephemera - well, not quite, but I do keep finding things to pass on to Jennifer who is in charge of this particular exhibition.

Now, a spot of advice from fellow amateur genealogists? Over the years - a great many years since my grandmother helped me draw up my first family tree when I was six - I have recorded my family history information in a variety of ways: do I keep all the various stages of my research, or just the final or best version? Obviously the two earliest versions - the tree Nan did for me, and the even earlier one her mother did for one of her grandchildren - are family documents in their own right, but is it worth keeping all the intermediate versions so that I can track the misconceptions and revisions as well as all the changes in technology?

Two lovely days work to finish the term - some delightful year threes in the Victorian School yesterday and some equally delightful year ones in the Secret Garden today.

One little boy getting off the coach looked towards the wind turbines and said "Look, the windbines are turning."

I think WINDBINES is a great word and we should all adopt it forthwith (with a note to the Oxford English Dictionary that it was first coined at 10.00 a.m. on July 14th 2009 by a six year old from Winterton).

Today would have been my godson Jemes' eighteenth birthday.

This is one of the ways he should have been celebrating his birthday with a meal out with his family; as it is, this will be a very hard day for them to live through.

At Easter James and I had discussed what present he wanted from me to mark the day he became a man, and - alone of all the boys over the years - he had managed to give me a sensible answer: a pewter tankard - a full pint for his beer - preferably antique, but not so antique that the lead levels in the pewter were dangerous. I don't like shopping, but how I wish I had been able to shop for that. I complain about how much the post costs, but how I wish I was complaining.

Tonight we had a talk in the church by David Young about the charity Point of Contact. www.instantwebsite.org.uk/sites/pointofcontact

Joe met David (pictured above) at Brigg Market where he was selling the fairtrade goods which he brings from Ethiopia, was impressed by what he had to say, and invited him to come and talk to us.

His talk included a very clear explanation of fairtrade, and I now understand the difference between the fairtrade coffee, tea, chocolate etc. we buy in the supermarket which is sourced from farmers who pay their workers an ethical wage and who are paid a 'fair' price for the raw materials which then go through the manufacturing and packaging process by British, European and American owned companies, and the completed fairtrade goods from organisations like Point of Contact. There weren't many people there, but we all bought some lovely things, and I shall shortly be visiting David's stall to do my Christmas shopping.

I was doing the History Detectives workshop today, and while discussing primary sources with the full class in the introduction I mentioned blogs as a modern primary source. Some of them hadn't heard of blogs, so I told them that I write one and that I'd probably write about them tonight. I don't usually mention schools or children by name and I wouldn't do so now had the teacher not been present when I talked about it and raised no objection whatsoever, and, as I promised them, here it is:

The Children of Brumby Junior School year 5 came to the Farming Museum, and were really, really good - with a special mention for Josh and Leon who assure me that they are going to be famous one day - so you read it here first.

I don't often comment on the news, and I just don't see the point in cutting and pasting great chunks from other websites on to a personal blog - sometimes with no personal take on the article added. However, sometimes a bit of national news strikes a personal chord, and today was a case in point.

Today there was a report on two more deaths in Afghanistan, and suddenly it struck me more forcibly than ever before: that's two more mothers going through what my friend Becky is going through - two more extended families that will never be the same again . . . parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, godparents, schoolfriends, family friends . . . who for ever will find that there is a hole in their lives where that young man should have been. For those who live away, the sense of loss will be infrequent, hitting only at Christmas and other family occasions when he should have been there, but for the immediate family, long after the process of unbelief and grief have gone from every waking hour, there will be daily those moments when (as Wordsworth put it) "Surprised by joy . . . I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom / But Thee?"

I've always known that war was wicked. I've written about it more than once on this blog - usually around November 11th. Somewhere there are petitions with my signature among thousands of others protesting about the Falklands War and both Iraq Wars, but somehow these deaths so soon after the death of my godson brought home to me for how many each loss is a personal tragedy.

That was two British soldiers. What of all the other nationalities, not least the Afghans themselves? Just because it is a different culture, it doesn't make the personal loss any less when a son is killed.

Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport--Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss?--That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

These people all came to tea today. They all delivered election leaflets for my father in last month's County Council election and helped him get re-elected. Although they are a fairly conservative bunch (small c) by no means all are card carrying Tories so much as Pa's personal supporters club.

So yesterday I was baking and mixing sandwich fillings while trying to watch the match of the Andies. (Query: would the right one have won those two tie-breaks if I had been concentrating harder on willing his success and less on my fruit loaf?)

Today, the weather has remained really hot and dry so that even the sunshades have needed to be in the shade (if you see what I mean) and I was urging people to eat quickly before the prawns became dangerous and the cream went on the turn. [Christmas catering is so much easier when you just dont turn on the heat in the room where food is being served until the very last minute.] The home-made lemonade and the elderflower cordial have gone down a bomb, but I have now used up all the ice cubes, and the fresh trays are still only half frozen. Anyway, I seem to have judged the quantities about right - there is a little left over, but not much.

Next time though, MY friends. I'm just catering staff today. A girl I knew at school has just moved into the village and suggests we might have a small and select gathering of the class of '73 before the summer is out.