Katie and her mental meanderings

We have been taking a salsa class – yes, I’m astounded I persuaded The Spouse™, too… he says “it was the best option available” – I think I suggested circuits or a spinning class instead. It’s fun but we are very bad at it. There is only one other bloke in the class, and he’s the teacher’s dad – and he’s much worse that either of us. Last week we found our shoes kept sticking to the floor which makes is very hard to dance – we wore different shoes this week which helps. And we learned (well, we were taught) the mambo and the cha cha cha today.

Currently reading: well, I’ve just finished one of my favourite childhood books, The Family from One End Street, by Eve Garnett. I got quite a few of my old books from my dad’s house a couple of months ago and I’m enjoying reading them. Sad geeky point is that in the book, two sisters are just finishing primary school and one goes on to grammar school, one doesn’t. When I was a child, before I read this, I didn’t realise that in the “olden days” children who didn’t go to grammar school left school at 14 – but some of the most interesting stuff I’ve been working on is about the effect of leaving school early, or not going to school, on performance on things like IQ tests. Whenever I read about older studies of this effect, I have always thought of Lily Rose and Kate in One End Street.

Well, it wasn’t quite high tide but it was higher than last time I did this particular bike ride – so we went round the first bit which looked to be about a foot under water. I thought it would have been quite low but it was high enough that there were jetskiiers skiing down the river which, when it is very high, covers the road but when it is low, is about 2 metres away from the road. So we managed to cycle past at jetski time. It’s not a very big river, though we used to have a port up the river, so it’s odd seeing jetskiers on it – a bit like seeing them on the canal.

We then cycled round to the village at the end of the point – the road has a sign:

The posts were actually under a little water but we could see someone walking along the road ahead so we decided to risk it and we got through – it was very muddy, though, and our bikes needed washing with the power washer when we got back. The village at the end is only accessible by this one road, as far as I can tell, and you can’t get through at high tide, so whoever lives there must have very flexible work hours!

For a change, it’s sunny in the North West. But that doesn’t make it warm – in fact it’s so windy my tomato plants keep falling over. I know, I’m sad and tomato-obsessed.

We went for a little drive and an even littler walk today, to have a look for paving tiles for the yard (we found some but not enough for our yard) and to see a bit of the countryside. We found a pottery (which, on a Saturday afternoon in August, was closed. What planet do they live on??) and a café with great tea cosies – we were very jealous because we only got a small cosy without a pom-pom and the people at the next table got one with. We also rudely told off an old woman and a little girl for feeding the ducks in a nature reserve. I’m such a busy-body – I think I will email English Nature to tell them to put up a notice.

I haven’t been feeling too great, but I’m feeling a bit better. The sunshine helps.

I am wearing a mad dress today made out of a kanga, it hasn’t been warm enough to wear summer dresses until now, really! Kanga are the East African coloured cloths with a border and a motto, like these:

The dress is made as a wrap dress so the border is down the front and across the bottom, but I didn’t leave the motto on when I made it.

We just went on a walking tour of Art Deco Morecambe. Hmmm… I hear you say, a walking tour of Morecambe? Well, it’s the home of the Midland Hotel, designed by various famous people (the main one I’d heard of was Eric Gill), and due for a major refit by Urban Splash, who are doing some quite creative stuff and making a lot of money for themselves in the process, in quite a few places. They are also knocking down half of some back-to-backs where The Spouse™ comes from, making the other half into trendy small houses with more outside space.

Anyway, Morecambe has lots of gorgeous buildings as well as a whole load of really horrible ones, and is due for major regeneration. It was very interesting overall – I learnt quite a bit about Art Deco and about the area, and I’ll know what to look for on buildings in the future – including the paintwork, Corporation Green, as seen on this tram:

(In case you are confused, the tram is not in Morecambe, but that was the only example of Corporation Green I could find on the web)

They are appearing! One of my plants, so far, has mini-mini tomatoes – about half the size of a pea. I know I need to get feeding them now. Oh dear, can I bear to go away and leave them? Well… I think I can…

Paid another visit to the prayer box today. The blow-up cushion is surprisingly comfortable, but having written “I am the light of the world” on a paper star, one tea-light wouldn’t light, and two more burned out. Hmm.

We are having a dead exciting evening outing tonight to go and see “Crash” (no idea what it’s like, but it has good reviews. Will try and remember to report back), in the next city south of us (about 15 miles away), it is something we’ve been talking about doing ever since we decided to move to the city I work in, rather than that city, since it’s nearer The Spouse™’s work.

Currently reading: Twentieth Century Britain, A Very Short Introduction. It’s interesting and readable, I’ve bought a few of the series as they are 3 for 2 in the Waterstones at work, and so far I’ve read Theology, and next up is World Music. They are just the right size to fit in a pocket or bag for a journey. Theology was unashamedly mainstream Christian, and 20thC Britain is almost all political history with a bit of social and art thrown in, and I’ve found nothing on immigration yet (apart from a very interesting picture of a Black family being evacuated to Eastbourne in WW2) but I suppose since I knew almost nothing about either of the topics I can’t really complain. Hopefully World Music, and the Koran which is also on my list, will not be quite so Dead White Male. Well, it would be hard for them to be, really, wouldn’t it?

Normally if I work at home either Friday or Monday it feels like years since I’ve been in the office, I have loads of post etc. This week the builders are still banging in the same bits in the corridor and I had hardly any post – particularly not exciting grant-related news which I am waiting for. But it’s the summer, everything has ground to a halt. Just as well really, as I have quite a bit to do and still feel a bit whacked and sniffly.

I’m giving a talk at a conference on Down Syndrome, that is, the talk isn’t on DS because I know next to nothing on it, but the conference is. I decided to try and educate myself yesterday: there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Having done a lot of research in related areas, I’m hopefully going to start doing some research on this, and we’ve had a couple of kids in for testing who have DS. One of them was also called Katie and she’s my favourite…

My beloved tomato plants are getting more and more flowers, but my nasturtiums have loads of caterpillars! I looked it up online and apparently they are very prone to them, and you just have to put up with it and plant them as sacrifices to caterpillars so your other plants won’t get affected. I might not bother planting nasturtiums next year (I’ve used up the packet of seed I had, anyway) but they keep self-seeding so I may get them even if I don’t. Along with lots of horrid black caterpillars.

Off work with a cold. Have spent most of the day watching vast quantities of rubbishy programmes I’ve recorded but The Spouse™ doesn’t want to watch. Perhaps my body decided it needed a rest after the weekend with the Invasion of the Hordes (mum, brother, sister-in-law, and 20-month-old niece).

Still, we discovered the best way EVER to amuse an under-2. Cricket on the telly. She loved watching the men run up and down, trying to catch the balls off the screen, imitating the bowlers (and when we imitated them, she knew it was on again and rushed to watch it), clapping when the crowd clapped, and generally giving her unintelligible commentary on the whole thing. She is what my late lamented mentor would have called a “tune child” – lots of words that sound like they could be intelligible if only you could crack the code, and all the ups and downs a sentence ever needed – if only we could understand her. Still, she has a good line in animal noises, even if the elephant says “baa baa”.

I’ve spent the last week in Berlin, mostly at a language conference. Going to a language conference in a country where you don’t speak the language is an odd concept. I have always been interested in language, and love learning languages, but hardly speak any German – mainly food words, as I spent a few months living with a German family with three children, but not in Germany, and they only spoke German at the dinner table. So I can read about 1/3 of the menu, and The Spouse™ can read about another 1/3 – until we got a dictionary, we made sure not to order off the remaining third. The tripe incident in Paris is still in our minds…

But the conference itself was good, as was the shopping (oops – well, 3 pairs of shoes for €115 can hardly be turned down, can they?). People liked my papers and hopefully someone else likes another paper sufficiently to invite me to an Important Conference in Boston in November, and lots of people gave me their cards, and it was all lovely, though my brain is now officially Full.

Berlin is also very interesting and striking, and parts of it are beautiful, though parts have flats that look, not surprisingly, like the East German-built flats in Tanzania, only in a better state of repair. We had a fascinating walking tour including a lot of history that I hadn’t understood – since I tend to bypass all those million programmes on the Nazis on the History Channel – saw Checkpoint Charlie, read about lots of weird and whacky East German escape attempts, and how they accidentally let everyone through the wall in 1989(!), and ate lots of cake. Oops again. We also saw the very moving Holocaust Memorial: here’s a photo The Spouse™’ took of it.