Open gardens

We're opening our garden today. Hope we have lots of visitors for our charities.

Whitecurrants

Usually our currant bushes are picked bare by now, but daughter hasn't come home from university and there are still many currants on the bushes, both black and white.

Home again

Son's back from uni for summer, or for some of it as he has plans to travel. Daughter's staying away in her new flat. Other daughter (step-daughter #3) is well ensconced in her university town. So it'll be a quiet summer. Perhaps I'll do my research work at home.

OU's 40th birthday

The OU celebrates its fortieth birthday this year. There's to be an open day on campus this Saturday. See http://www.open.ac.uk/platform/campus/events/open-unlimited-anniversary-open-day. And here.

Last time I came to an open day here was 15 years ago with my two small children and husband in tow, my first visit to my university although I'd finished my degree by then and started tutoring. Daughter got photographed in an OU magazine, playing maths with the maths clown. This time it looks full of interesting activities again, and what's unusual is that some of them seemed aimed at teenagers rather than small children. I'll be there. I might have husband with me, but I don't know about large son. Pity daughter won't be around.

Cinema

We went to look for Eric at the Oxford Phoenix. I hadn't paid much attention to Cantona before, but rather liked what I saw in this film. See an excerpt here.

What car?

Shall I take advantage of the government scrappage scheme and trade in my trusty not rusty Volvo, the only car I've ever owned? I wouldn't change it otherwise for another couple of years. If I change it now, I get a brand new one now for the cost of buying a second hand one in a couple of years, and get one that should be cheaper to run.

What shall I get? A red mini like my mother drove when I was ten years old, or the two-CV that delighted me in my teens, a yellow Beetle with character or the little green sports car someone once wanted to buy me. Years ago I was advised to get a Ford Fiesta or a Polo, but they were uninspiring cars that reflected the personality of the advisers. Now I might consider the insurance costs, particularly if I put my children on the insurance. Or how long will I need a big car to move students' stuff between university and home or flats? And do I care? Perhaps I'll get a Skoda. Perhaps I'll stick to the secure and reliable Volvo.

Not a birthday

Today he doesn't celebrate his birthday

Old age

My father skyped me. My octogenarian parents are computer savvy. They were using word processors in the nineteen eighties and have been using email for years. They like using Skype, and my mother bought me a video camera so she could see me when she skypes.

But Dad said that his eyesight has got very much worse, very quickly over the last few weeks, and now he can't read a newspaper. When he eventually got his camera working on Skype, I could see him peering over it with his magnifying glass. I hope there are lots of web sites with big print that says, 'press here for automatic text reading.'

And he's grown a beard! Last time he had a beard was in the 1970s, though he had a red moustache in the 1950s. He looks good with his grey beard.

Sunday summer flowers

The flowers are beautiful now, but when we have open gardens at the end of the month they'll all be past their best.


Squeals above me. I look up to see a crow harassing a red kite. They wheel around, attacking and protesting. I've no camera ready.

Smoky sunlounge

The garden is lovely. Husband is out there now, mowing the lawn, getting everything ready for the open gardens day. I look out on pink valerian, yellow Alchemilla (Lady's Mantle) and a beautiful blue Ceanothus bush. I love their blue flowers.

But the leaky windows of the sunlounge let me know that husband is burning a bonfire at the bottom of the garden. I hope the neighbours haven't got their washing out on this sunny Saturday morning, and that the local police community support officer (PCSO) isn't walking round on the other side of the park wall. I don't want husband done for anti-social behaviour.

Chocolate

I like dark chocolate, organic dark chocolate, 70% plus dark.

But I get cold sores, and I know they appear when I've eaten chocolate (or lots of nuts). So since I've had too, far too many cold sores for months now, I've stopped chocolate. Two weeks with no chocolate. And now I also have no coldsores. So I'm happy.

The funny thing is that I don't have itchy eyes either. I've had those on and off for three or four years and remember having them one Christmas, so it wasn't just hayfever. The doctor said they were dry and it was my age. But now I reckon, that getting itchy eyes at Christmas and Easter, times when I do eat a lot of chocolate, is more than co-incidence. Chocolate made my eyes hurt. So now I must eschew chocolate.

Why doesn't the doctor know that?

Facebook

I use Facebook. My teenagers were on it and weren't keen on me joining in too, but when a young colleague and fellow post grad encouraged me, I joined it. Then, I found several of my fellow associate lecturers, the techie ones, were on Facebook too and I quite like the companionship and the opportunity to get to know my distance tutoring colleagues a bit better through Facebook postings. It's not as good as FirstClass and you can't have long threads of conversations in real discussions, but it gets us by.

Now I read that people like us are leaving Facebook, it says here.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/27/facebook-baby-boomers/

Council polls

Today we vote for our county councillors. The parties all sent leaflets, but the Conservatives had a leaflet that said that at a council meeting, the Conservatives had voted for lower taxes, and the Lib Dems had walked out in protest. That sounded so weird that I tried to contact them to ask them to explain. But I haven't heard back yet. I also emailed the local Lib Dems, and again, I've not yet heard back, but I did meet a little lib Dem bird in the street who told me that the debate was whether to use the money on hospital services or whether to save the council tax money, that the Chair wouldn't let the Liberals speak so they walked out. That sounds likely, given that I witnessed the Chair not letting Liberals speak at the council meeting in November (recorded here) and blogged it then. The minutes of the meeting when the Lib Dems didn't vote is kept at the County Council site, and the incident reads much less contentiously than the way the Conservatives reported it.

So I went to the polling booth this morning, and asked the lone Conservative. But he didn't know anything about it! Didn't he even read his own party's leaflet? To me, it looks like the local Conservatives are acting underhand, immorally, don't brief each other of the line they are taking so some of them are ignorant of what is going on in their own party.

Voluntary work

I've got three days of voluntary work coming up, on one particular task. There's a lot of reading to do in advance as well. A lot of people are involved and it's quite a responsible job. Sometimes I wonder why I do it, but together with my colleagues we provide an independent view, so it's worthwhile.

Blessings

Amongst my blessings are my children - more than my fair share perhaps because I have my children, my husband's children and the grandchildren too.

One child gave me this rose bush some years ago. Look how it's blossomed, like the children blossom as they grow up.

Safe vehicles, safe riders

A cyclist was killed on Exchange Street, Aylesbury this morning. They say a lorry driver has been arrested and charged with dangerous driving. People tell me bikes are dangerous, but I reckon it's more the bigger faster vehicles that are dangerous.

But I have two men in my life who insist / insisted that they are /were safe and know /knew what they were doing. One is still alive and confident in his ability to control his vehicle, but like the other man, doesn't realise what prats other people can be, doesn't realise that someone else can make mistakes. People

• load their van with a loose ladder that will fall off in the street (as I witnessed this week),
• not tighten their car wheel nuts, so it could roll along the road and into your car,
• overload their glider, so spin onto you
• get distracted by barking dogs, so drive into you (as happened to this family in 2005)
  

You need three mistakes to have an accident. That was Ann Welch's assessment in her book, 'Accidents happen'. She's right.