Month: January 2021

Let it snow!

January 25, 2021 / / 11 Comments

It can’t have escaped anybody’s attention, that we have had a reasonable fall of the white stuff over the past couple of days.

And whilst it looks pretty and it gets the kids and the dog excited, I hate it.

Yes, it was great when I was young and I can remember being out in it all the time back in the early seventies – that’s when we had proper snow… and at Christmas too.

But once I grew up (last Tuesday), I took a real dislike to the stuff.  And, as I’ve got older, I’ve come to dislike it more and more.

And there are two main reasons for this:

  1. It’s cold.  I hate the cold. I used to relish it, but not so much nowadays.  Actually, I don’t like the heat either – I’m more of a temperate kind of guy: 20 degrees is the Goldilocks zone, for me.
  2. It disrupts my journey to work.  As if I don’t spend enough time sitting in traffic as it is, a half inch of snow will double or triple my journey time, because we are rubbish at driving in the snow.

Whenever snow falls, I literally dread having to drive to work.

But, every cloud has a silver lining:

We are in lockdown and I am working from home.  I can sit in the warm comfort of my home office, with a nice cup of tea, looking out the window (because that’s what I normally do at work) and thoroughly enjoy the snowy spectacle outside. No having to defrost the car for fifteen minutes before I start; no sitting in a line of traffic en-route to the motorway, because some silly sod is just sat spinning his wheels as he tries to get up the slip road; no frustration at being stuck for hours on the M25 because a lorry has jack-knifed 30 miles ahead of me on the other carriageway.

Nope, just me and a cup of tea and a lovely view out the window as the sun rises.

I don’t know if any more snow is forecast, but if so, bring it on!

To educate or not to educate, that is the question

January 13, 2021 / / 10 Comments

This Covid lockdown business is having a detrimental effect on our children’s education, as I’m sure everyone is aware.

My son is in his final year at high school – the year in which he was supposed to be taking his GCSEs, but who knows what’s going to happen there?  One thing for sure, is that he has missed a lot of proper schooling. Even when they went back to school – between the lockdowns – he was only there for a short period, as someone in his year (a teacher) tested positive and the whole year had to be sent home to self-isolate.  This happened twice in the same month!

The school – like others – started doing online lessons, but it was all very haphazard at first.  I think they have improved now though and seem to have a more rigid online curriculum in place. Even so, Harry tells me that they have a lot of supply teachers and that they are mainly doing just revision.  Possibly, at the end of the year they will be assessed on what they have learnt so far.

Maths has always been a strong point for him, but when we got him to take a mock GCSE exam before Christmas, he failed.  We were told that on the stuff that he knew, he was actually very good, but that there were large gaps in his learning… obviously.  As such, we are now paying for him to see a private maths tutor once a week. Whether this will help in any exam he may or may not have at the end of the school year, I don’t know, but it can’t do any harm and – like any parent – I want to give him the best start for when he leaves school. I just wish I could afford to also get private tutors for English, Geography, Engineering and Science.

Definitely science.

Following his maths tutelage, I was discussing his other lessons with him last night and he told me how, for his science homework, he has to write up why a thick electrical  wire has greater resistance than a thin wire.

Of course, I told him that he had it the wrong way round, but he showed me in his book where he had written down verbatim what the teacher was saying in the lesson.
She had said “A thick wire has a greater resistance than a thin wire, because there are more particles to get in the way of the electric current”.

More particles to get in the way!! ??   WTF!

It beggars belief!

I have written to the school headmistress, asking her to have a word with said science teacher, but it does worry me, if that is the calibre of some of these supply teachers.

The Brexit Effect

January 1, 2021 / / 8 Comments

Pinch, punch, first day of the… er, year.

So, how’s 2021 been for you so far?

It’s all been a bit “meh!” so far, in the Masher household.

Christmas went OK, but shortly after, Harry started feeling ill: headache; bit of a cough; that sort of thing.

He got over it within 48 hours, but then it was Amelia’s turn. She seemed to have it a bit worse than he did… but then she’s also a bit of a drama queen, so we took that with a pinch of salt.

Then, the current Mrs Masher decided it was her turn: headache; cough; shivers… she had it pretty bad.

I thought it inevitable that I would catch it too.

But,  I didn’t.

And then, I did.

To be fair, I wasn’t too bad: headache and flu-like shivers and a touch of diarhoea  diaroeha diahre…  the shits.

Well, when I say a touch of… I mean it was unwise of me to be further than 30 seconds from a lavatory!

My sister reckons we’ve had a touch of the Covids, but I don’t think so: I don’t remember the ability to defecate through the eye of a needle, being one of the symptoms listed.

So, after several days of this, Mrs M popped out and got me some Imodium (other poo-thickening remedies are available) and that seems to be doing the trick.

In fact, it’s now gone the other way:  we had a curry last night and a full English breakfast this morning, but so far, there has been not a squeak from my bowels.

We’ve been out of the EU for less than 24 hours, and I have already lost my freedom of movement.

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