Family wedding

June 6 was a gloriously happy day being nephew's wedding in a garden, in Geneva, Switzerland. Hordes of us invaded to meet his wife's family and celebrate their marriage.
The invitation to us all meant we four siblings, met for the first time since our mother died, nine years ago. We flew or trained in from the US, Scotland and England. Who knows when or if we’ll meet again? Nephew, T, has three cousins who married quietly during the years of Covid and lock down, my daughter on another continent, giving us only 23 hours’ notice! 

The build up days of the week before the wedding included an evening get-together. Our side met Friday evening at an Auberge where half the family were staying. Prosecco and nibbles followed by pizza or pasta if you wanted to avoid gluten.  I got to meet my nephew, C's new wife, and nephew, G's girl friend. I left after we'd got through a couple of bottles of wine or more, but the twenty and thirty year olds went to a whiskey bar found a wonderfully smooth one, made locally, so local that it was the bartender who made. It's great that these cousins too have got see each other and meet their partners after so many years - the last meet up being their grandparents 60th wedding anniversary in 2010.

My grateful thanks to T & I for inviting us all, and to I's parents for hosting us in their garden.

Working then and now

Have you written your CV? Do you have a job? What is a job? If it's some action that you get paid for, then you probably count it as a job, rather than a chore.

I've worked since I was 16. As soon as I finished taking my GCE exams, I walked down Chorlton high street going in every garage, hairdresser and shop asking for a job until I got one in the local supermarket. The supermarket manager must have asked me about my background because someone got excited about me having taken (I hadn't yet got the results) maths 'O' level. Consequently, they put me on green groceries. This required weighing produce and then doing complicated arithmetical calculations in your head, like if apples are one and seven pence ha'penny a pound, and this customer wants six ounces of apples, then how much must you write on the brown paper bag?*
Maths is not arithmetic; maths is patterns and logic. I can do patterns and logic (though I didn't know it at sixteen). I cannot do mental arithmetic, and I particularly cannot do mental arithmetic when under stress. Can you?

I was rapidly taken off the green grocery counter and put on the tills instead. The tills were fairly amusing because you met lots of customers, usually women and you had a machine to add up all the purchases, even the extra carrier bag that they asked for after you'd totalled. The first day, I used to put the total back in the till again and then add the few pennies for the bag so I could be sure the sum was correctly calculated. Unfortunately, this meant that at the end of the day, the till was short of the money for all the extra times I'd used it as a calculating machine.

Despite these disasters, the manager kept me on for the next five weeks of the summer holiday, paying me five pounds a week; and he took me back for the next two years of sixth form employing me on Saturdays and school holidays. Thus, I earned my tiny fortune that I spent on my two guinea pigs, one rabbit and twenty pet mice, or on Sunday train fares to the peak district, to trek for my Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme efforts. My brother got jobs in university vacations when he worked on roads along with Irish navvies. He earned a fortune compared to me, but that always was the differential between male and female wages.

What 16 year old now can get a summer job so easily? Over ten years ago, I encouraged my teenagers to look for something, but they came home explaining that everywhere they went, they were told, "Come back with your CV". They didn't get paid work till they went to uni where they got part-time jobs as librarians, tutors or lab assistants. One of our kids spent a year between uni and her first professional job working in B&Q, coming home grubby and proud that she'd earned.
My grandmother started working in a china shop at 14, my mother started teaching in an inner city school at 19, and I was 21 when I started teaching. Yet none of our children started working until at least 22. Several took gap years. One did a foundation year before uni. All of them have done masters degrees. So they're all highly educated, and took years about it.

But it seems hard for them to find and keep jobs.  I suspect my fourteen year old grandmother needed some way of earning her keep, some job that would pay her for her efforts so her auntie didn't have to keep her (her father having died and her mother emigrated). My mother wanted a qualification so she could support herself whether or not she found a husband who could keep her. Similarly, girls of my generation were encouraged to work before marriage, expecting to do hairdressing, secretarial or clerical work, and if they were a bit brighter they could be nurses or teachers. Most of them were not expected to go to university and some were actively discouraged. I started by East End primary kids with the enthusiasm of a twenty year old that thought she was doing good. Then I found teaching English as a Foreign Language was fun because of the intellectual challenge of explaining my own language. (You tend to take it for granted, automatically knowing things like the difference between "I do" and "I'm doing" or "you must" and "you don't have to" or "I could have done" and "I was able to do). A a job was a means of earning a living, of paying the rent, eventually a mortgage and contributing to society.
You used to aim to find a job. And you didn't always have to submit a CV.

---

*BTW, one shilling and seven pence ha'penny for a pound (twelve pence in a shilling and sixteen ounces in a pound) means that I probably should have written 7d on that paper bag. It'd be an easier sum at 1/4 (one and four) a pound because that would be 16d a pound or a penny an ounce.

Influence of BBC micro today

Why has my daughter now moved to another continent? After recently attending a seminar on the history of educational technology, I now blame this event on the BBC.

1. the BBC micro came out circa 1980, 
2. inspiring the start of the games industry in the UK by the 2000s, which is how 
3. my daughter met people through on-line games in the 201xs.
4. then she played gamers from other countries, even continents
5. then she met one special gamer
6. and emigrated...

all because of educational technology
I recommend Mike Sharples slideshow at https://www.slideshare.net/sharplem/introduction-to-educational-technology-55332225

Family influence

Today is my son's birthday. He influenced his family, and one really good influence happened on a car journey. Son sat next to me as I worried about my doctoral viva, and he told me about Toastmasters, the club where you practise speaking in front of people. He asked me to speak for two minutes about my doctoral topic, and I did!  Shortly afterwards, I found our local Toastmasters club and joined. It was such a useful experience that I told his sister, and she joined. Then a year or two later, when his step-sister had to make a speech at a wedding, she joined, and she got her partner to join too. The two of them got so involved that they were on the local committee helping out a lot.
All through the influence of one member of the family.

Tae kwon do progress

My daughter needed to do a sport for her Duke of Edinburgh Award, and found and chose a local tae kwon do club, to which I had to take her. It wasn't a very salubrious walk however, so I would stay and wait for her. Boring!
Then I realised that Bytomic tae kwon do isn't just for kids; they were taking from six to fifty-six. I was then younger than 56 so I joined in. Years later, I'm still going, have attained first Dan black belt and know a lot more about Korea where this martial art started in 1956, than I ever guessed I would! And am I fit! From a health check I had a month or so ago my metabolic age apparently is younger than my chronological age by about 15 years. That means I'm metabolically younger than I was when I started tae kwon do.
I don't rate my skills highly though, so I need extra practice and training, probably more than the younger members do in order for me to keep up with them. Some ways I do that are to

• go to more than one class a week 
• cross-train with a variety of instructors, 
• attend the black belt sessions every six months
• aim to grade
• participate in tournaments

Now I'm so pants, so slow and clumsy that I have only participated in two or three tournaments. So you can imagine how chuffed I am that at yesterday's tournament I gained a medal for my pants patterns!
I must tell my daughter. And by the way, they've taken away the upper age limit, so if you're near or over 56, please come and join so I'm not the only older woman in the club.

Exam results

The A level results have come out. I'm delighted for my nephew who has earned the place he wanted at the university he wanted. His mother is justifiably proud.
Ten years ago, I was in the same position, and my son won the place he wanted. He went on to the right university for him, coming out with a good degree, and then went on to get a Masters as well. A week later, on a French airfield, my daughter rang her school from the public pay phone to get her GCSE results. With no speaker phone, she repeated out loud what they told her for her nervous mother standing next to her.  She did herself and her school proud.
Like ten years ago, I've been planning to go to France, but things conspire. Elderly aunt might need some support this week; planes no longer fly to Grenoble; trains take seven hours, and no way am I driving 500 miles.  How did I do it in 1997 with two small children in the car? Even taking several days with a stop in Paris at friends and at a campsite on the way down, on my own, a single parent, - how did I do it? But I would now like to go away for a holiday in the sun.
At tae kwon do, I (discretely) asked a mother what her son's results were. His mother looked grumpy, muttered quietly what his results were but pointed out that anyhow he didn't need them to get where he wanted to go. Neither did I when I did my A-levels - I already had my place at training college so I had no motivation to do really well at my A-levels so I think he's done fine. I was on the point of telling his mother this and congratulating her to have got him through his first 18 years and he could start his adult life, when she grumbled about all these people on Facebook announcing their offspring's wonderful results.  It's funny because she's being putting on Facebook what a wonderful holiday her family was having in several different countries - it sounds wonderful and I'd love to do that too.  Was she boasting about her holiday, but grumbling when others boast about their children's successes?  No.  She was just sharing her pleasure.

Helsinki

Four tranquil days by the sea, even on the sea too, sailing round the islands, like Isosaari we spent this week.  'Iso' is the Finnish for 'big and once I lived on Big Robert's Street - Isorobertinkatu.  'Katu', the Finnish equivalent of the Swedish word 'Gatu', means gate or street.
Daughter and I wandered the streets of Helsinki
and the market

Red cathedral, Helsinki

and the cathedrals, red and white.
We had a lovely evening meal with a Sibelius concert - we should have stayed there longer.

Finland is full of trees, pine trees and delicate silver birch trees. And water seems to make up half its land in lakes, not rivers.  In the fields of Suomenalinnea (an island off Helsinki where the Russians built a Finnish fortress - the Gibraltar of the North), we saw no cows or sheep or signs of rabbits, though I noticed that several Helsinki women walked poodles or dogs that looked a bit like poodles.  The streets were clean and clear, and pavements were wide for pedestrians and separate tracks for cyclists.


We ate reindeer meat, and berries - lingonberries and something like blue berries that were very palatable.
The ligon berries were however so tart that your cheeks watered.  I found a use for them by mixing them in with the butter-fired mushrooms I cooked in the evenings at the YHA hostel.
In the hostel, we met the usual friendly sort of foreigners.  An Indian couple from Ahmedabad advised me to visit again, and a very English gentleman with bottle-bottom thick spectacles introduced himself with "how do you do?"  After the usual pleasantries about where we came from he started a long story about how he came to lose his driving licence, a story that entailed him drawing my attention to the braces that held up his yellow knee length dungarees that he'd made for himself so he could attach his wooden leg more easily. Eccentric?

Eurokangas fabric store

Helsinki train station

Daughter found the most magnificently well stocked fabric shop and had a whale of a time examining various cloths to turn into coats, capes and costumes.

Wedding hats

One of our daughters is marrying and we're told we have to wear hats.   Here are some hats that daughter and I have made.

Last week, granddaughter #1 turned up at tae kwon do in her new silver hat!  And here are inspirations:
https://uk.pinterest.com/rowleypolybird/hatspiration/
I think I'll photo hats at the wedding.

Family favourites talking

It is so nice to have grown up children who can talk to you adult-to-adult.  Over supper, husband, daughter and I were discussing showers, the difference between showers and baths, and the hygiene of showers.  This involved explaining fluid dynamics with reference to Bernoulli.  Have you heard of his work? He studied and explained how differences on pressure affected water and air flow and his theories are relevant to gliding, and to shower curtain hygiene. This principle explains why gliders fly, and why shower curtains gather germs, and it's fluid mechanics  that you would study at honours level in mathematics or physics.  Daughter did not wince a moment when husband explained the theory and he gave me a thumbs up when I asked, "when you have a shower, what does the shower curtain do?   Does it move in or out? That's the effect that Bernoulli models"
Similarly, decades ago, at meal time, I mentioned something about educational theory - Piaget's ideas of how a child saw and compared volumes when asked. My teacher mother exclaimed in delight that now there was someone in the family who knew what she was talking about. Isn't a pleasure to be able to discuss ideas with your grown-up family?

Daughter's commencement

We went to Dublin to see daughter at her Commencement - that's what they call it when you begin or commence into academic status as a Master.  She's commenced her mastery of linguistics.  Now she's going to combine her maths and linguistics in researching and analysing computationally.  Well done her.  She's going to be a useful woman.

It's interesting that she's in Dublin, the place where her great grandfather came from. Like daughter, he was interested in languages, apparently winning a medal for Gaelic as a child, being the first in Ireland.  I wonder how his mother would react, watching her descendant, sewing like she did, but in this university, the one that the arch bishop told them not to go to!

IN the evening, daughter had arranged for us to attend the common supper at the university as a celebration.  We were puzzled when we arrived to find only two tables listed for the guests who had been at the Commencement, but when we entered the hall we found it full.  At most benches, sat a hundred or more undergraduates and graduates (scholars), at the top table sat begowned fellows, and we guests sat at these two tables that white table cloths, wine glasses, and red material covered (hard) chairs.  Prompt at six, one of the servants strode from the top table to the huge entrance door and slammed it shut, whereupon all the scholars and fellows rose to their feet with a shout.  Then someone at the top table said grace in Latin.  It was a rather longer grace than I heard at Oxford and not in words that I recognised. When grace was over, we all sat and supped.  After the main course was over, a similar routine took place in that something banged, everyone stood, grace was said, the door opened and scholars and fellows trooped out leaving us guests to have sweet course and a coffee.  Very nice.

A word on the scholars at Trinity.  It seems that in their second year, some undergraduates are invited to sit the scholarship exam.  Achieving it, gives the student status as a scholar, which comes with free fees, free accommodation and a free meal once a day for the rest of their time studying there, including not only their undergraduate studies but subsequent masters and PhD work too!  Doesn't that encourage the best to stay on to research!

New years' travelling plans

You don't want to spend a fortune on air tickets to another continent and then not stay for more than a couple of weeks. I have such a dilemma in that I haven't been to see my brother in the States for 16 years. I last went to visit brother and his wife in 1996 when they paid for us to spend Christmas with them after my husband had died in August. Christmas promised to be very bleak that year, and I was devastated, deep in mourning. Since brother & wife hadn't been able to fly over for the funeral, which would have been an utter waste of money to fly so far for a couple of days for the sake of someone dead, brother paid for daughter, son and me to fly to Vegas and to stay with them for three weeks. Son had three weeks holiday from his new school, and I just took daughter off for the last week of her school term without even asking permission.

I remember those weeks well, brother's very sensitive care for all of us, sister-in-law's welcome and companionship, and they kept us busy. They took us to visit the Vegas casinos (keep within the paths because we were with children), see the white lion, and the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil. I'd never heard of it then, but it was the most amazing circus, with no words, just acrobats, and clowns. They weren't nice clowns though. SiL told us that we weren't going to have seats near the front in case the clowns picked on us. And we watched one poor man following a clown who had his tickets and was showing him to his seat, along the aisle, along a row, over the back of some seats, along another row, over the back of some seats, then the clown tore up the tickets! The poor man was stranded.

But I haven't been to see brother & SiL since. They've come here several times, and
my son has visited them twice, but I've not been there. Mainly I've been engrossed in bringing up my children, first on my own, then I remarried, and have been building relationships with my new family, and husband had paid work too and didn't retire until 2008, by which time I was well into my PhD, so couldn't travel too much - except for that trip to India for the Navjote. I could travel to academic conferences for my studies, and even got the expenses covered, so I managed to get to a very eminent conference in Canada in 2010. This year I presented at a conference slightly closer to home, in Amsterdam. Now I have no academic affiliation that will support me at conferences, so I'll probably only go to a couple in Oxford, and might even gate-crash those, depending on how much they cost.

So I want to go and see brother & SiL in 2012. I've arranged my Open University tutoring so that I am free in September for two or three weeks, and husband's agreed to it, though he hasn't yet agreed to more than two weeks and we haven't yet booked our tickets. I expect we can do more than just stay with brother & SiL like I did last time, because now we don't have lots of children to look after. In 1996, SiL had three children and I had my two. I visited them earlier in 1988 when between us we had five children under school age, and we went nowhere but the supermarket, which was my excitement of the holiday - I'd never been in an American supermarket or anywhere in America for that matter. So my previous two trips to the States haven't been very good, and I've had little to entice me back, but this time husband and I might hire a car and go some other places too, like the Grand Canyon, or Zion National Park, and if we go in September, SiL says the temperature is good and we could go alpine hiking up Mt Charleston or visit their holiday hut.

Maybe husband and I will visit India in 2013, or I wonder when I could visit with daughter. When I was in India in 2008, I watched all those young women, and I missed my 17 year old daughter, and I watched them together and thought that she would get on with them. But daughter is finishing her first degree this year and may have a job without much leave in 2013, so she won't have the time to come with me. On the other hand, she loves linguistics, and has just spent a year studying maths in French in France before returning to Bristol to finish her maths degree, and is considering taking a masters in linguistics. At the moment she's looking at studying in Dublin or Wales, and she's job hunting. I wonder if she could study languages of India or linguistics in India. Then spending money to visit India with her in 2013 wouldn't seem like a waste of a fortune.

Bureaucratic messes

I sent off my tax return a month ago, to town A, as tax man asked. Now, a month later, I get a letter from tax man at town B, saying he wants my return! So I've sent him a copy of the return I sent the first tax man, together with a covering letter. Friend who's an expert on tax says that all HMRC post now goes to a central system that allocates it round the country to offices that have capacity. So the fact that I sent something to town A doesn't mean it actually went there - it may well have gone to town Z! It should however have reached them and been recorded so the implication is that they have managed to lose it. Typical!

Daughter's university accommodation wants to be paid on a card, and with direct debit but the account needs two signatures so it doesn't have a card, and the accommodation organisation has mislaid or lost the direct debit we set up in April. They've agreed, reluctantly to accept a cheque. So I've written a cheque, and a covering letter.

Messes come in threes. I've managed those two but I can't manage the pension letters I get from Barclays. I can't make head nor tail of their jargon, their numbers, their variation on dates, annuities, instructions and policies. I wish I'd never bought the bloomin' policy because the effort is just not worth it.

Growing up

Both my children recently contacted me, asking me about computing problems. How nice! At last they can talk about technical subjects I understand.

I was at teacher training college in the seventies, and one Sunday lunch at home my mother, also a teacher, and I were discussing how children learn. She exclaimed

"At last! Someone I can talk with about Piaget."

How nice to have adult children.

Son settled

Son has found a flatmate for the year of his MSc (in electronic engineering here)

Sunday, spent several hours in son's flat waiting to meet potential flatmates and feeling 'de trop', that his mother should not be there now he's an adult, but he had asked me, and the landlord is a family friend. So the three of us sat and waited.

Many students come to the UK to study at masters level - I think there are more foreigners than English students and son had been emailing several people from various parts of the world - Ireland, India, Switzerland, and we'd had discussions about names, where they might come from and what sex a name might be. So it would be an interesting afternoon meeting these strangers, and it was interesting.

One student walked in with her father, and immediately I felt I had a part to play - I was no longer 'de trop' because I represented son's background and family. Student With Father had lots of pertinent and sensible questions to ask, texted a few hours later to express interest in flat, and asked to meet again, which they did. Father and I discussed our families, our jobs, our religions - they are Jains from India - whilst SWF and son agreed bills, whether they'd keep the television, when they'd move in and how to draw up a contract.

Son sorted and settled. And daughter too - see her new blog here. Happy mother.

She's leaving home

Daughter left early this morning, away for a year to study maths in a foreign country, on the Erasmus programme. The Erasmus programme encourages European students to take a year abroad to continue their studies. It's a great idea, and daughter has been delighted to be at a university that lets her do this.

Daughter has nowhere to live yet and is spending the first three nights in a youth hostel. My friends tell me she'll be fine and she rang a few minutes ago to say that she's arrived and fine and at the hostel, and met another Erasmus student, one that she might share a flat with for a year, a stranger that she doesn't yet know.

Lucky girl.

Guitar hero mum

Here's a first for me. I've at last played my first PS2 game even though it was around 1998 that son first bought a second hand play station. He had to plug it in himself to the video and TV system and I've not had control of its programming ever since.

Recently he got a game called Guitar Hero, and daughter, back from uni, has been playing it. She decided to get a second controller and persuaded me to leave my sewing to join in. I've been playing something of Blur's and Coldplay. It's fun, heaps easier than real guitar and a new way of listening to the music because you can move with it, which I like.

Wow! Go me!

Shopping

Our parents are coming up to their diamond wedding anniversary but our father thinks he won't get our mother a diamond because she can't see any more, so he emailed round us siblings for alternative ideas. My brother promptly volunteered his sisters, wife and sister-in-law to take our mother on a shopping trip.

Now that's a nice idea to have a girls' day out. I can't remember going on a shopping trip with my sister ever, nor with my sisters-in-law. I remember going shopping with my mother, particularly when I was a teenager, though not with my little sister. I like going shopping with my daughter (bookshops) and with my step-daughters too. SD#2 was my style specialist when I went out to buy my first new pair of spectacles in over ten years. And granddaughter #1 is fun to go shopping with - we went to the jewellers together to choose something for her mother.

I suspect my sisters-in-law would be fun to shop with, though my brothers might be a bit nervous. Years ago, sister-in-law #1 arrived at some evening do in a most splendid bright orange trouser suit (it was the eighties). She explained that it had been half price so a bargain, but even the half price was horrendously high. I love her choice of colours, design and outfits. I'd enjoy the experience of going clothes shopping with her.

I'll wait and see what my sisters (and SiL) say.

a Good Day

June 17th
Both my children today are having good days. Although neither has spoken to me, I've heard from them electronically. One texted that she's:

"Off to Bordeaux! :))"

which means she's got good end of second year university exam results. The other has Facebooked:

"Done"

which means he has taken his last university exam this morning and is relieved.

It's beautiful weather.

And a Good Day.

Daughter in Hong Kong

Daughter at university has made new friends, and one consequence is that between exams last month and results next week, she's nipped off to Hong Kong this week where she's meeting a friend and discovering Asian heat and humidity. She writes:

You should see the lights and the shopping malls! It truly is a city that never sleeps. There are so many lights and skyscrapers! Closing at 12 seems early! I had octopus balls that night for supper, which were a new experience. But I figured that if I was going to another country, I might as well take every opportunity on offer. But even the supermarkets are different! The fruits on offer are so different to what you would find in England; and those that are similar are massive. Like an apple the size of a large orange, larger than a tennis ball.

I'm almost jealous that I've never been. But I've had other things in my life, and more to go. It's a wonderful life.

Weekend away

We've spent the weekend in Bath and Bristol, seeing daughter and listening to a concert that included a composition by son-in-law. Interesting time and diverting from life that goes on as normal.