There's just over a week of the holidays left and children all over the country are getting ready for the new school year.
Laura is quite keen to get back to school. She's going to be a "top infant" and, for the first time, her teacher will be male. She says he's very nice but quite strict and she's looking forward to being in his class.
She's done a lot, over the holidays. In the last 5 weeks she's learned to ride her bike without stablizers and to swim without arm-bands. It's a frantic, splashy doggy-paddle but at least she doesn't sink. She's also had a week in London, with her mum, where she went on the London Eye, saw the changing of the guard at the palace, went to the London Dungeon, which scared her witless, and visited the Tower amongst other things.
"D'you know, they have ravens there and if they ever fly away the Queen will fall", she told me. "Oh yes", I said, "They clip their wings don't they?" She gave me a pitying look and said, in that scornful, all-knowing way that only a 6 year-old can muster, "They trim their flight feathers". She'd been chatting to one of the Tower wardens.
I've done a few things not normally on my daily agenda, too, as I've been Laura-sitting some of the time. I've been squirrel-spotting at the Dam, our local lake/beauty spot (we didn't spot any until we got home and found one eating the bird food we'd put out in the garden), and I've sunned myself while eating an ice-cream in the play area of a very large park a few miles away, then wandered round the same park's children's zoo where a goat tried to eat my trouser leg. I've been caught in a thunder storm on a long walk on the banks of the Bridgewater canal and had an extortionately expensive cup of tea and a scone at a nearby National Trust house.
I've also had wonderfully easy journeys to work in the mornings on my 3 days a week. It's been a pleasure to drive along roads, that in term time are choked with traffic, at 30 m.p.h. instead of the usual crawl at 7.30 a.m. Conversely my lunch-time forays in town on foot, to Boots or M & S or whatever, have been a matter of dodging hoards of teenagers with arms linked wandering along pavements like a relentless, incoming tide and avoiding smaller models hurtling into and out of MacDonalds and Burger King like stampeding mini-buffalos.
So, on September 5th Laura will set off to school in her new shoes and coat, excited to be seeing friends she hasn't met up with for a while and eager to impress Mr. Adams. I'll make the grid-locked trip into Warrington to an office that's no longer half-empty due to holidaying colleagues and those who work "term-time only"; back to no more than 1 space a week on the office car-park (run, strictly, on a rota basis). The nights will be (are) drawing in and it will be all preparations for the run-up to Christmas, though it'll be broken up for me when i nip off to Malta for 2 weeks in October.
Not long until the frosts, freezing rain, icy gales and slushy roads. I can hardly wait for next Summer.
Laura is quite keen to get back to school. She's going to be a "top infant" and, for the first time, her teacher will be male. She says he's very nice but quite strict and she's looking forward to being in his class.
She's done a lot, over the holidays. In the last 5 weeks she's learned to ride her bike without stablizers and to swim without arm-bands. It's a frantic, splashy doggy-paddle but at least she doesn't sink. She's also had a week in London, with her mum, where she went on the London Eye, saw the changing of the guard at the palace, went to the London Dungeon, which scared her witless, and visited the Tower amongst other things.
"D'you know, they have ravens there and if they ever fly away the Queen will fall", she told me. "Oh yes", I said, "They clip their wings don't they?" She gave me a pitying look and said, in that scornful, all-knowing way that only a 6 year-old can muster, "They trim their flight feathers". She'd been chatting to one of the Tower wardens.
I've done a few things not normally on my daily agenda, too, as I've been Laura-sitting some of the time. I've been squirrel-spotting at the Dam, our local lake/beauty spot (we didn't spot any until we got home and found one eating the bird food we'd put out in the garden), and I've sunned myself while eating an ice-cream in the play area of a very large park a few miles away, then wandered round the same park's children's zoo where a goat tried to eat my trouser leg. I've been caught in a thunder storm on a long walk on the banks of the Bridgewater canal and had an extortionately expensive cup of tea and a scone at a nearby National Trust house.
I've also had wonderfully easy journeys to work in the mornings on my 3 days a week. It's been a pleasure to drive along roads, that in term time are choked with traffic, at 30 m.p.h. instead of the usual crawl at 7.30 a.m. Conversely my lunch-time forays in town on foot, to Boots or M & S or whatever, have been a matter of dodging hoards of teenagers with arms linked wandering along pavements like a relentless, incoming tide and avoiding smaller models hurtling into and out of MacDonalds and Burger King like stampeding mini-buffalos.
So, on September 5th Laura will set off to school in her new shoes and coat, excited to be seeing friends she hasn't met up with for a while and eager to impress Mr. Adams. I'll make the grid-locked trip into Warrington to an office that's no longer half-empty due to holidaying colleagues and those who work "term-time only"; back to no more than 1 space a week on the office car-park (run, strictly, on a rota basis). The nights will be (are) drawing in and it will be all preparations for the run-up to Christmas, though it'll be broken up for me when i nip off to Malta for 2 weeks in October.
Not long until the frosts, freezing rain, icy gales and slushy roads. I can hardly wait for next Summer.