Learning

Tutoring, meanwhile, comes in two shapes: a gentle walk and a rapid ascent, which I prefer to define as ‘the shepherd’ and ‘the intervention’.

Wednesdays are my school run day and the hour that I spend with Elle, my 6 year-old friend, is one of the most important commitments of my week.

I have been spending perhaps more time than is healthy studying images of the tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This most powerful of medieval women — Queen Consort of France (1137–1152) and of England (1154–1189) and Duchess of Aquitaine as her birthright(1137–1204) - lived an incredibly long life, dying at 82 in the place of her choice, Fontevraud Abbey in the Loire Valley.

I absolutely love this line of illuminated laundry by the artist Sergey Kim. Here it glows in Amsterdam as part of the 2021 Light Festival and another washing line hangs along Liverpool’s Castle Street as part of the city’s River of Light Trail.

I have Michelle Obama to thank for chartreuse. I don’t recall ever knowing that it existed as a colour until I watched the 2009 inauguration and heard the pundits describe Michelle Obama’s coat and dress as felted wool lace in chartreuse.

My teaching equipment has evolved over the years. In my very first job, I carried my essential bits and pieces in a battered leather satchel that my parents gave me when I started Big School aged eleven. At that stage, my kit involved tissues for tearful students or my own runny nose, a tube of lip balm, various biros, my A4 teaching planner and assorted whiteboard markers.

Today is Chinese New Year and, for me, the festivities began with a dawn raid on Marks and Spencer to liberate food for our celebration-for-two. Rural Cumbria does have Chinese takeaways but our nearest Chinatown is in Manchester, which is not only a hefty drive away but is also well beyond lockdown reach.

My five-year old friend, Gabriel, has been designing a super-hero as a Year 1 literacy project. His image - drawn on a great big piece of paper - was the same size as him with distinguishing features made from carefully-cut pieces of orange paper.

This strikingly visual noun phrase from Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Dart’ kept me company on my walk this morning. Nearly forty-eight hours into Storm Christoph, the river ran huge and fast and the ground oozed sponge-saturated beneath my wellies.

I had a 3.30pm appointment with Wilfred (aged 6 and 49 weeks). Usually he is too busy with after school club and his in-between lunch and dinner snack to meet at this time. Lockdown #3, however, has put the kibosh on after school club and Wilf had delegated the making of his afternoon snack to his mum, my sister, so I was granted a rare chat slot.

Drinking lovely coffee is the easiest way for me to pretend that I live a much more sophisticated life. The reality is that I spend great chunks of my days slithering around the lanes and the river bank with Bruno, our labrador.

Two years ago, I received a thank you card from Nina, one of my Year 11 students, when she finished her GCSE exams. In this beautifully written, neat and thoughtful card Nina thanked me, among other things, for teaching her humility. I have thought about this card often in a rather rueful manner because lovely, high achieving Nina was thanking me for a conversation that we had about failure.

If press reports are right then tonight Boris Johnson will announce to the nation that the Covid-19 slogan ‘Stay at home. Save lives” will change to “Stay alert, control the virus and save lives.” As an English teacher…

There is a baby sparrow our garden fence. It has been there for more than an hour and I keep going to check on it. It inches a few steps one way and then back and it is alternately cheeping and twisting its head to look up into the sky.

The Great Fire of London burned for 4 days from Sunday 2nd of September 1666 until Thursday 6th by which point the medieval city had been destroyed though its embers still smouldered. Rain on Sunday 9th finally extinguished the last of the fires and traumatised Londoners were able to assess the damage.

Gordon lives two doors away from us. He turned eighty a fortnight ago and one of his retirement pastimes is wood-turning. Periodically, he brings us scraps of wood from his workshop to use as kindling for our wood-burner. One of these kindling bags contained the two halves of this beautiful sycamore bowl.