And so it ends ...

... this glorious British summer. Not glorious weather, which for much of the summer has done its damp and miserable worst - though it did stop raining for most of the Olympics - but other than that, what a time we have had! The diamond jubilee celebrations, the Olympics, the Paralympics ... the whole wonderful series ended with the closing ceremony of the Paralympics on Sunday and the athletes' parade through London yesterday, and there was even the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday thrown in for good measure. 

As the summer comes to an end it feels as though the whole country has a deeper, happier, more confident sense of what it means to be British in the 21st century than it did just a few months ago. The British, and in particular the English, tend to be reluctant to indulge in displays of patriotism. We aren't great at either flying the flag or expressing what this country means to us. A combination of self-deprecation and cynicism makes it easy for us to underestimate all the good stuff that goes with living in Britain. This summer has changed that. We celebrated the Queen's sixty years as head of state, and in doing so looked at our nation a little closer and stood a bit taller. We put on a truly GREAT Olympic games. Then we topped that with undoubtedly the best Paralympics ever. Beforehand we thought of the coming Olympics with a mix of excitement and nerves, hoping for the best but half-expecting it all to go pear-shaped. But it didn't. It turned out to be a glorious sporting party, just what we needed to lift the national mood and distract us from the economic gloom. Suddenly we feel that Britain really is Great Britain again. It feels as though we have collectively won a gold medal, one that we hoped for but didn't really expect to achieve.

I didn't go to any of the Olympic or Paralympic events but even so I felt the buzz, both from the television coverage and from the second hand experiences of friends who got tickets. From what I hear everything went remarkably smoothly, with a friendly atmosphere fostered by the 70,000 volunteers who acted as games makers. The noise in the stadiums was deafening (Rose, who is sensitive to loud noise, would most definitely not have coped!). The whole thing just worked. 

As for the sport, it was extraordinary to see the medals racking up for Team GB. I am old enough to remember the days when the Olympics meant an endless series of glorious, or less than glorious, defeats for British athletes. In those days gold medals were few and far between - at Atlanta in 1996 we won just one! At Beijing we managed 19 and in London an astonishing 29, finishing 3rd in the medal table behind the US and China. Extraordinary! The last time that happened was in 1920. By the time the Olympics ended we had a whole string of new sporting heros. If I had to pick a favourite moment I think it would be Mo Farah winning his second gold of the games and celebrating with the amazing Usain Bolt. 

Then there were the Paralympics. I missed the early stages as we were still away and didn't manage to catch as much as I would have liked as last week was busy, but what I did see was wonderful. Again, friends who went said the atmosphere was simply amazing. And inspirational, watching the athletes who had to compete not just against each other but against their own disabilities. By the end of the games we had been given a whole new language of sport - blade runners, goalball, wheelchair tennis - and yet more new heros. 

And now it is all over, though with a postscript last night as Andy Murray became the first British man to win a Grand Slam tennis tournament since 1936 with his victory in New York. One of the catchwords of the Olympics was legacy. Quite how that will eventually play out I don't know, but for now I have been left with the sense that something, somehow, is better than it was before.

Olympic Opening Ceremony

We are not a sports oriented family and rarely watch sport on TV, but I have always loved watching the Olympics. When the 2012 Olympics were first awarded to London I hoped to get tickets, but decided against due to a combination of price and the high demand for tickets here in the UK that left pretty much every event massively oversubscribed. Even without the prospect of being able to watch live, anyone living in the UK over the past few weeks would have to live under a rock - and a pretty big rock at that - not to get caught up in anticipation of the London games, and on Friday night all five of us settled down to watch the Olympic opening ceremony.

We had no idea what to expect. Britain is superb at the big royal events - think William and Kate's wedding and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - but has a decidedly patchy track record when it comes to other public celebrations. The uninspiring "River of Fire" on the Thames to mark the Millenium barely even lived up to the billing of damp squib, for example. So who knew what we might get for the Olympic opening! It was also hard to see what might work. A Beijing style ceremony was never on the cards, both because the cost would be unacceptable in the current financial climate and because the British simply don't do massed ranks of identical performers. Neither was a Hollywood style extravaganza likely - again, too expensive, and that sort of razzmatazz would be likely to leave the British public cringing at the sheer un-Britishness of the spectacle (we might enjoy watching other countries do this type of show, but just can't take it seriously in ourselves). We also tend to be uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism ... so what was left?

What we got was an opening night romp through aspects of British history and culture which reflected our peculiar national character - quirky, eccentric, diverse and humorous. We are a nation of individuals, yet still value popular institutions (we LOVE our NHS!). We are four countries tangled together into one. All that came through in Danny Boyle's show. The ceremony zoomed from Jerusalem and Abide With Me (which I understand NBC cut from its coverage in the US) to the Beatles and the Sex Pistols, by way of Shakespeare, James Bond, the Queen, the invention of the world wide web*, Mr Bean, and the defeat of Voldemort by a fleet of flying Mary Poppinses. It was weird, crazy, moving, and entertaining, sometimes all at the same time. Tevye and I started watching with a slight feeling of pessimism (see River of Fire above), but by the time the show reached James Bond and the Queen we were shouting "genius!" at the TV set. With all the financial doom and gloom of the last years as a nation we really needed the morale boost of a party we could enjoy, and we got it. We did wonder what viewers around the world wouAkersake of the whole thing, but I did a bit of googling of reviews and they seemed to be mostly positive, if occasionally baffled.

So now we move on to two weeks of indulging in the great British sport of gallantly failing (mostly) to win medals.

Oh, I nearly forgot ... I thought the cauldron was amazing! So different to anything that had been done before, and so effective.

*Did you realise that when Sir Tim Berners-Lee typed "This is for everyone" on the computer in the stadium it was live tweeted. How cool is that!

Medical Matters

We seem to be going through one of those spells where every week has "personal maintenance" appointments of some type for someone. Between the five of us and my mother there seems to be a constant stream of visits to the doctor, the dentist, the optician, the orthodontist, the chiropodist and so on. Last week it was the optician for Rose and the asthma nurse for me, not to mention that my mother had her hip replacement surgery. Next week it is the orthodontist for Marie and the optician again for Rose.

Rose has surprised me. When we took my mother to the optician's a couple of weeks ago she complained that her eyes were blurry. She sailed through her pre-school eye check and is reading well, so I assumed it was either because she had a bit of a cold or just association of ideas because we were at the optician's, but I made an appointment for an eye exam just to be on the safe side. It turns out she was right, and her eyes really are blurry. She is long sighted with a slight astigmatism and is going to need glasses. She has to go back again next week to have eye drops to relax her eyes so that the optician can measure the prescription properly (apparently little people's eyes work so hard adjusting focus it is hard to get an accurate measurement without something to calm them down). We now understand why she has been reluctant to move up reading levels at school. She has tended to look at books from the next level and say they are too hard, though the lower level books are way too easy. Her teacher and I both put it down to lack of confidence and coaxed her along. It turns out Rose was right. The books are hard - not because the words are too difficult, but because she struggles to see the smaller print! It also explains why she doesn't often volunteer answers in phonics lessons - it isn't that she is too timid, she just can't see the board properly!  From what I have been able to dig out of her, it seems she didn't have any problem in her first year at school, last term it was getting a little blurry, and this term it has got worse.

After 18 months of not having any asthma problems and feeling I had it well under control, I got overconfident. In December I got a chest infection, and now a slight cold has turned into an evil cough. Throwing everything I had at it (stronger preventive inhaler and maximum dose of reliever) was just about holding things together but wasn't really making any headway, so now I'm on the first course of steroids I've had in two or three years. Two days in and I'm still coughing and puffing, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed it will work and doesn't turn into another chest infection.

Marie and braces is turning out to be a complete pain as the wires keep breaking. In the six weeks she has had them we have been back to the orthodontist twice with broken wires. She has now broken two more, but fortunately has a routine appointment booked for Tuesday so can wait until then. I presume the breaks are because the wires have to stretch unsupported across the gaps where she had molars removed to make space for the rest of her teeth. Apparently she will get a stronger type of brace after six months, but I can see us trekking backwards and forwards to the orthodontist ridiculously often until then.

All of which makes me incredibly thankful yet again for the National Health Service. Out of all that lot, all I have had to pay is £14.80 for two prescriptions. Rose's glasses will be free, as is Marie's orthodontic treatment (though I seriously hope they don't cap the number of times they will deal with broken wires!). I was able to book my medical appointment online with my choice of doctor or nurse (I picked an asthma specialist nurse). It saddens me to see that the US election year is beginning to trigger outbursts against "socialized medicine" in general and the British NHS in particular, which according to the Republican candidate Rick Santorum has "devastated" the UK. Huh? I picked up on this from William Oddie's response at his Catholic Herald blog, from which I also discovered this staggering statistic:

The US spends 7.4 per cent of GDP on healthcare (to which very few are entitled). We spend 7.2 per cent of GDP on the NHS for a system to which everyone in the population has an absolute right, and which most of those (I am one) who actually have any real experience of it, consider pretty effective

I think that alone is enough to indicate that our system is not a disaster. I wrote a bit about the different perceptions of healthcare in the US and UK in the aftermath of the last US presidential election here. For what it's worth, I don't think our system would be possible in the US and the changes Obama is trying to introduce are not even remotely similar to the NHS, which was a product of particular historical circumstances - not just the aftermath of the Second World War as I mentioned in my previous post,  but also a long history of social provision though the Poor Law in this country, dating back over 400 years. I don't know what the answer is for America, but I do know that holding the NHS up as a devastating and disastrous example of what could happen there as a result healthcare reform is just ridiculous. I know there are many Americans who would love to have our health service. I don't know anyone here who would wish to replace the NHS with a system based on private health insurance.

Rethinking Halloween

For a long time I have been ambivalent about Halloween. When I was a child, Halloween was a very minor date on the calendar. I remember bobbing for apples and maybe playing a couple of other games. I don't remember whether we ever made Jack o'Lanterns - I think maybe we did, but not every year? Whatever, Halloween was hugely overshadowed by Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes) which was a huge deal. We made a Guy, collected wood for a giant bonfire, and went shopping for fireworks - we would be given a certain amount to spend, and in those days that meant selecting individual fireworks and weighing up their relative excitement value. Should it be one giant rocket, or three small ones? The excitement built for weeks.

Since I have had children of my own I have dithered over Halloween, which has become a bigger deal year on year. I don't have any objection to celebrating Halloween in principle. From my perspective as a Catholic All Hallows Eve is part of a package with All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day on November 2. My problem is how to celebrate it. Every year since the girls were little the amount of Halloween paraphenalia on sale has multiplied, and trick or treating has got more popular. Some people love it, others hate it. When Angel and Star were younger we sometimes had a small scale Halloween party, but didn't trick or treat, partly because it felt rather alien and partly because we felt that the cons (disturbing people who may not want to be bothered by kids knocking on the door, feeling that it is something that has been imposed on us by the media) outweighed the pros (fun! sweets!). I was also wary of the whole spooky side of Halloween, which is more of a British thing - Halloween costumes are always ghosts, skeletons, witches and things of that type, and telling ghost stories is something else I remember being part of Halloween when I was young.

This year I decided I was warming to the whole thing. Catholic tradition holds that this is this is the time of year to especially remember and pray for the dead, and I presume that somehow the ultimate origin of the spooks and skeletons at Halloween ties in with that tradition. As for trick or treating, I noticed that people have started to leave lit pumpkins outside their doors as an indication that they are happy to be visited by trick or treaters, and that it has become much more of a family event, with lots of families and small groups of children out and about enjoying the atmosphere. We decided to let Star take Cherub, who just managed to let excitement win out over fear - she is Little Miss Timid, and I would have bet against her making it out of the door into a dark night full of people dressed in scary costumes. She set out with great trepidation, but returned with a haul of sweets and the satisfaction of having faced her fear and overcome it.

Cherub, incidentally, was probably the only child in town not wearing anything black or spooky. She was determined that she was going to do it her way. And her way was to dress up as a ballerina with bunny ears. Halloween Cherub style is pink and fluffy!

Learning Styles

Angel is now over half way through her GCSE exams (yay!), with the worst - biology, chemistry and physics - behind her. I have been fascinated by her revision style. I had never realised how much of an auditory learner she is. Apparently when it comes to Angel and revision, podcasts and audio are the way to go. For English Literature and the sciences (the most memory intensive subjects) she downloaded a mix of literature guides and  podcasts, recorded herself reading Of Mice and Men aloud, and has been studying by iPod.

For me, this is like watching a Martian at large - a completely alien way of studying. I am the most un-auditory person going. I find focusing on something I have to listen to very difficult indeed, and choosing to listen to something in order to learn it would be torturous for me. I learn best from books, and always have. I remember once having a conversation about lectures with some students. Some of us were frantic note takers because it the only way we could process a lecture was by converting it into text. Others needed to listen and would only make notes after the lecture once they had processed it aurally. Both groups were amazed that anyone could study the other way.

What is your learning style?

Daily Routines

I recently stumbled across a collection of the daily routines of famous people (a blog currently on hold as the idea is being turned into a book).

Browsing through, I was intrigued by the routines which involved chunks of work interspersed with large blocks of leisure time, with great things accomplished in those concentrated work periods, presumably at least in part because the leisure meant that mental and physical batteries could be recharged. For example, Winston Churchill:

• 7.30 - Woke, ate breakfast in bed and read the papers, then worked in bed
• 11.00 - Got up, bathed, took a walk, went to his study (presumably to work)
• 1.00 - Extended three course lunch until...
• 3.30 - More work, or played cards or backgammon with his wife
• 5.00 - Nap
• 6.30 - Bathed and dressed for dinner
• 8.00 - Dinner with drinks and cigars afterwards (could last until after midnight)
• After dinner - back to his study for another hour or so of work

And this was C.S.Lewis's ideal, based on the days when he lived with his tutor:

• 8.00 - Breakfast
• 9.00 - Work
• 1.00 - Lunch
• By 2.00 - out for a walk
• No later than 4.15 - afternoon tea (alone with a book)
• 5.00 - Work
• 7.00 - Dinner, followed by leisure to talk or for lighter reading

Inevitably, most (or all?) of the routines described do not involve even basic domestic duties, which were presumably performed by wives or servants, yet alone responsibility for childcare. One of the things I find hard about life with children is the fragmentation of time - the snatching of an hour here, or a half-hour there - and the inevitable interruptions that make it hard to truly focus on anything, or to fully recharge. Skimming through the daily routines got me fantasising about how I would like my days to look if I had no commitments, and how much more it would be possible to accomplish if I was free to match the structure of my day to my natural rhythms (read: night owl!) ... or even if I was just able to think in chunks of time rather than snippets. I think working from 10 until 1, followed by a long lunch, exercise and some reading time, then work again from 4 to 7, followed by dinner and a leisurely evening sounds pretty good - not far off C.S.Lewis's ideal, but with a slightly later start.

Healthcare Here and There

As I am dipping my toe into a hot potato subject here, I'm going to start with a disclaimer: I thought it might be of interest to my transatlantic mixed bag of readers to attempt an explanation of why there is a huge gulf in the perception of healthcare issues between the UK and the US. I'm not trying to make any sort of political point.

The US healthcare debate has been in the news again over here, and I was reminded of a forum thread I saw on Ravelry recently. Triggered by a question from a bemused British poster asking (politely) why plans to introduce a universal health care system in the US were reducing Barack Obama's popularity, it rapidly ran to over 1500 posts before being shut down by a moderator.

A year ago I could have been that bemused poster. Having grown up with a National Health Service (NHS) it had never occurred to me that people of good will could possibly consider nationalised healthcare a bad thing. In the run up to the presidential election I realised that a number of online friends - people whose integrity and opinions I respect - thought it a very bad thing indeed. Huh? What was I missing? After ten years hanging out on largely American message boards and egroups I had heard enough horror stories about health insurance and the lack of it for an American equivalent to the NHS to sound like a no-brainer to me.

By the time the presidential election was over I think I had more or less got my head round the deep seated suspicion many Americans have of government involvement in healthcare. The gist of it seems to be (1) distrust of "big government", and a belief that individuals should provide for themselves rather than rely on the state, (2) cynicism about the ability of government to do a good job in providing healthcare, (3) financial inequities and the likelihood of paying more for worse services, and (4) restriction of choice. And trying to put myself into American shoes, I can sort of understand this, though my ingrained assumption that national healthcare is best means it takes all sorts of mental gyrations for me to do so.

The mental effort is necessary because in the UK few people now remember a time before the NHS and we cannot imagine living without it. The idea of having to personally, directly finance our healthcare is literally foreign to us. Private top-up health insurance is an option, for those who want and can afford quicker, "better" (maybe?) and more luxurious treatment, but we assume that a reasonable level of care should be there automatically for everyone, regardless of financial circumstances. There is almost universal support for the NHS as an institution, and it is the sacred cow of British politics. While politicians and political parties may have different views on how the NHS should be run, and the extent to which private services can or should be integrated into the NHS, it would be political death to suggest that the NHS itself is a bad thing. Aspects of the service provided by the NHS are often criticised, but there is a general belief that the system can be improved from within. In other words, the NHS has flaws, but none that undermine the general perception that a universal healthcare system mainly free at the point of use is unquestionably the right option for this country.

So why are British and American perceptions so different? There is a big difference in the way government is perceived in the UK and the US. In the UK we tend to see government as irritating but necessary. The British grumble about and laugh at our government, but underneath the cynical veneer most of us are optimists who expect the government to at least be trying to work in our interests, whatever its political persuasion. We expect the government to bumble around and mess things up, but in a fairly well-meaning sort of way and without becoming so incompetent that things fall apart. From what I can see, many Americans are deeply suspicious and distrustful of government interference in a way that simply isn't the case in the UK. The British also seem less resentful of taxation as a way of redistributing resources for the benefit of the community as a whole. I'm not sure why this should be.

Then there is the matter of history. Put simply, the UK already has a national healthcare system; the US doesn't. Ours was set up in the aftermath of World War II. There was a widespread feeling that after the sacrifices and hardships of the war years steps should be taken to make post-war life better for all. The political will that made the introduction of the NHS possible in 1948 was a function of its time. The circumstances in which the NHS was introduced also helped to give it a high value in the national consciousness that has never been lost. Introducing government run healthcare in the UK in 2009 would likely be a very different prospect. For one thing, the financial implications are far larger. Back in the 1940s it was thought that once the whole population received good medical care, the health of the nation would improve and the cost of the NHS would decrease. Nobody then could have predicted the medical advances that would be made and the increased costs they would generate.

All in all, America and Britain have many similarities, but there are also some pretty big differences - attitudes to healthcare among them.

Patriotic Puzzlement

Lots of "Happy 4th July" posts on my blogroll got me thinking ...

(Pause to send belated good wishes to my American readers.)

Why do we have no national celebration day here in the UK? Should we? And if so, what would we celebrate?

I suppose that is not entirely true, in that Guy Fawkes downfall and the preservation of King James I and Parliament is still widely celebrated on November 5th, but Bonfire Night commemorates a single event, not anything fundamental to our nation's existence And there is the rub. We don't have a foundational event to celebrate. Our country grew more or less organically over time, and is in any case made up of four separate countries which aren't necessarily inclined to celebrate each other.

Since my childhood the United Kingdom has become more obviously fragmented. Scottish and Welsh nationalism has increased, with the kick-on effect that the English are now becoming more nationalistic. The Scottish, Welsh and Irish all have their own separate "parliaments" with jurisdiction over certain issues. The English don't, but there is some resentment of the fact that Scottish, Welsh and Irish MPs vote for measures that apply only in England. When I was a child the English flag - the cross of St. George - was never seen. Then it began to appear at football matches when the English team was playing, and now it has become more visible than the Union Jack (the red, white and blue flag of the United Kingdom). The Scots and Welsh always did use their own flags, and continue to do so. Unlike Americans who fly their flag with pride, the British rarely do. Few British families own even the smallest version of their national flag. It doesn't help that patriotism has been tarnished by extremist, racist political parties who splatter their literature with Union Jacks.

National days have been celebrated in the past. Empire Day was celebrated from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s, but became obsolete with the end of the British Empire. The late Victorians and Edwardians celebrated Trafalgar Day in honour of Admiral Nelson's great naval victory during the Napoleonic Wars, but that declined after the First World War. These days it is hard to imagine what could be celebrated as a national day throughout the United Kingdom. There isn't any obvious "Britain Day" - no "the United Kingdom starts here" landmark. The closest would be the Act of Union of 1707 which formally united England and Scotland, but the Scots, many of whom would like to see an independent Scotland, would laugh derisively at the idea of celebrating that, and in any case it has no direct relevance for the Welsh or Northern Irish. We have no formal constitution to celebrate, no beginning of a style of government, no obvious chronological landmark.

The United Kingdom is essentially an oddity ... a schizophrenic state. Ask a British subject their nationality and the answer could be any one of English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish or British. While there was a British Empire it was easy for the inhabitants of the British Isles to identify themselves as British; these days not so much. The Scots and Welsh will mostly call themselves Scottish or Welsh. The English are confused. If asked my nationality I always say English; Tevye on the other hand always says British.

I'm pretty sure more people would describe themselves as English than was the case thirty or forty years ago, and I reckon it is time we got a special day to celebrate being English.The Scots and the Northern Irish already have specifically nationalist public holidays - St. Andrew's Day in Scotland, and St. Patrick's Day and Orangemen's Day in Northern Ireland. Why not give the English and Welsh equal treatment by making St. George's Day and St. David's Day public holidays? In the last few years I have noticed cards on sale for St. George's day, so there is already a trend in the direction of celebrating it as the English national day.

It seems that everyone else gets a day for patriotic celebration, and I want one too. St. George's Day would do nicely.

I Need Space

... or so last night's episode of my recurring dream would seem to indicate.

We were looking round a house with a view to buying it. The rooms were enormous ... a dining room the size of a tennis court, with a glassed, conservatory style roof; a kitchen the length of a cricket pitch with scads of storage space, every conceivable cooking appliance, and a walk-in, room-sized fridge (!); and a gigantic living area. I don't remember looking at the bedrooms. Bizarrely, this palatial abode was on the market for a price little more than our current home, which I explained to myself was because it only had four bedrooms. And no garden. I was utterly smitten with all this space, and knew we absolutely had to buy this house. By the time I woke up I was busily downplaying all the downsides - needs a new boiler? No big deal! Will cost a fortune to heat? No, no ... all that glass will keep it warm. We hadn't sold our house yet? Surely it would sell quickly!

Whatever. I just had to have that space.

Literature Meets Life

I had a strange experience last night, when I unexpectedly came across someone I once knew in the book I was reading.

Alison Uttley's A Year in the Country, published in 1957, is a month-by-month account of a year in the Buckinghamshire countryside. I assumed it would be based on the south of the county where she lived, but in parts it roams further afield. This is the passage that caught my attention:

A small paper-backed book has come today in cold December, and it gives me peculiar pleasure for it is the short history of a Buckinghamshire village written by two people who have lived all their lives in the place, whose roots are deep in country earth, whose memories go back to simple ways of living. The record has been compiled by them as a labour of love, a preservation of their local traditions, lest the village, like so many others, is swept into the grasp of a town. This seems unlikely at present, but they are taking no risks with an uncertain future when their country lore may be forgotten.

This small history of Stewkley is well-contrived, and the authors have used their intimate knowledge of life and work during the last seventy years, with links through the centuries. One of them, William Capp, a man of seventy-five, is a craftsman whose thatched cottage I visited some time ago to see the violins and violoncellos he had reconditioned and cured. He buys old broken instruments at village sales, and makes new parts, using the smooth white wood of box which grows on the Chilterns, and pine and pear wood; lengthening the tail-piece, making an inlay of box, and replacing the ivory tip of broken bows with the hard white box wood which resembles ivory. He is a clever joiner, and artist in his work, belonging to a family of joiners and carpenters. Around the wall of the tiny cottage hung the instruments, seven of them, which he had mended and prepared for sale.

When I was a child my parents bought me a violin from William Capp. I remember him and his cottage clearly - a strange and exotic room, the dark walls hung with violins, with others he was working on lying around in various stages of progress. William Capp himself was a very old man at the time, certainly in his late 80s, maybe over 90. I remember him as tall, but that could just be my child sized perspective playing tricks. It quite startled me to have a memory brought back so vividly and unexpectedly.

Stewkley was my father's village. It was swallowed up not by a town, but by modern life and a tide of newcomers. My dad's was the last generation to remember the old ways and traditions. The book Cherub was "reading" in this post was the book Alison Uttley describes.

What is Your Passion?

Amy at Epiphany Springs asks "Do you know your passion? What is it?". An interesting question that took some thinking about. What is a passion? Where is the boundary between a passion and a hobby or interest? I have plenty of those, as you can see from my sidebar introduction. I even used the word passionate when I wrote it: "reader, writer, musician, scrapbooker, knitter, cross-stitcher, lifelong learner; passionate about Catholicism, good children's books, educational ideas (especially those of the early 20th century English educational pioneer, Charlotte Mason) and medieval history".

Thinking it through in more depth, I think I have pinned down what makes something a passion for me, and have narrowed it down somewhat. Being passionate about my family and my faith is a given, and not what I am talking about here ... I'm looking for those things that build me up; that leave me feeling refreshed and relaxed; that re-energise me. Passions lead me into a state of flow - "the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity" is the Wikipedia definition, and sums up exactly what I mean.

I think I have two passions, one simple enough, and one I found it hard to put a finger on, because it is broad enough to encompass a number of different interests. I enjoy various crafts, but they are relaxing hobbies rather than passions (though maybe knitting comes close). My first real passion, the easy one, is music. Not listening to music - though I do enjoy it - but playing. In times of crisis, my instinct has always been to pick up an instrument and play. The amount of music making I do fluctuates, and I go through periods where I don't play much at all, but they are usually brief. Currently my preference is playing with others rather than alone ... in the last several years I have dotted around between orchestra, wind band and brass band, according to what is most manageable. For the last couple of years I have been playing in the brass band, rehearsing a couple of times a week, which is a nice amount for now. It energises me, and I usually come home feeling more "up" than when I left. I should say that I am not a brilliant musician. I have a very modest amount of talent and pick up new instruments easily, but I am very much a "jack of all trades and master of none". The only instrument I play moderately well (by amateur standards) is the violin ... but I get the sense of energy and flow from the challenge of practicing a new instrument just as much as from playing more challenging stuff on my fiddle.

The second passion is research. I find searching for and organising information utterly absorbing. This is why I love academic history ... learning about history is interesting, but it is the research side that gets my juices flowing. One of my favourite ways to spend a day is in a research library or archive. I can get the same excitement from visiting a record office that others get from attending a big sporting event. Just walking through the door gives me a thrill, and hours pass like minutes. Who knows what I might find? All those hidden nuggets of information, the clues that allow me to piece together a puzzle, all waiting to be uncovered.

Other interests flow from this passion for research: genealogy, educational ideas and planning, learning about new subjects in general. Tevye calls me an information junkie, and a lot of my planning mania is probably rooted in the pleasure of researching things to put in my plans. I wondered whether to include books as a passion - I am a bookworm, after all! - but decided many of my literary interests are subsumed in my passion for research - reading for information, literary rabbit trails, book collecting, and putting together book lists all tie in. Maybe books are a sub-passion? Writing, similarly, is a sub-passion. I love putting together my nuggets of information into a clear, readable form. I am totally a non-fiction writer. Creative writing holds no appeal for me whatsoever. I just like collecting facts and building them into something interesting to read.

So, echoing Amy ... do you have a passion? And what is it?

7 Quick Takes Friday

Joining in with Jennifer's seven quick takes again ...

-- 1 --

This week I had a moment of awareness when I stopped to truly appreciate my good fortune. How many 48 year olds get to start their day singing nursery rhymes with an enthusiastic, giggling two year old? There may be times when I feel old and tired and stiff, but I wouldn't swap for the world.

-- 2 --

Friday is my day for socialising over food. My neighbour (and good friend) doesn't work on Fridays so we usually share breakfast, and Little Cherub and I regularly go out for lunch with my mother. I've also promised to take my middle daughter to Borders this evening for a browse and a Starbuck's hot chocolate. Lots to look forward to today!

-- 3 --

I can't say I was surprised by the announcement I heard on the radio news that October's retail trading figures had failed to live up to the doom and gloom predictions of the media. Sales had fallen only a microscopic 0.1% since last month. I went to a large retail park on Saturday to pick up a couple of duvets. Busy, busy.

-- 4 --

Listening to coverage of the economic summit I noticed another difference between elections in the US and the UK. In the UK the leader of the winning party becomes prime minister with immediate effect; in the US there is a time lag before the new president takes office, leaving the outgoing president in a rather awkward position where he has to look presidential but can't actually commit to anything.

-- 5 --

Tevye and I have a tradition of sending out an annual Christmas newsletter with a twist. Each year we try to come up with an original theme or approach. I'm feeling smug that I managed to hit on something entirely new for this Christmas. Unfortunately I can't tell you what as some recipients read this blog. All I can say is that it is quirky and cryptic and different from anything we have done before.

-- 6 --

Angel came home from school yesterday with an interim report giving scores for behaviour, effort made in class, and organisation and quality of homework. Excellent scores across the board except, bizarrely, for English were they were very poor. Having looked at her English work I can confidently predict that someone messed up and input the wrong numbers (the report is all electronically generated). How nice to be able to be so sure that a bad report is wrong ... and how unlike her parents she is. I found some of my old school reports a while ago. Comments included the classic "K does the minimum of work or less". Tevye tells me his weren't much better.

-- 7 --

Winter is forecast to arrive today, with temperatures plunging down to freezing and maybe a few snow flurries over the weekend. According to weather lore, a cold November is supposed to herald a mild, wet winter ... "if November ice will bear a duck, all the rest is mud and muck".

Election Night

I'm an election night enthusiast. I don't usually make it all through the night, but for UK elections I always stay up until the early hours, and I couldn't resist watching last night's US election results. All that punditry, and David Dimbleby gravitas, and clever interactive maps turning blue and red ... irresistible!

As I watched I was fascinated by the differences between US and UK election nights. Here are a few random comparisons ...

In the US Republicans are red and Democrats blue; here Conservatives are blue and Labour red. Very confusing.

American results seem to be announced by the TV networks before they actually happen. Did I get that right? Here all the candidates for a parliamentary seat are gathered on a platform while the returning officer announces the result. This means we get to see their face at the moment of victory or defeat - in comparison, the American election coverage was, literally, faceless. Often a number of fringe candidates stand alongside the main parties in parliamentary elections. Sometimes they look like this:

This adds some entertaining eccentricity to the announcement of results. I suspect there is something peculiarly British about a returning officer solemnly intoning "Screaming Lord Sutch, Monster Raving Loony Party, 51 votes; Gordon Brown, Labour, 35,000 votes ...".

Results - or accurately predicted results - come through much quicker in America. It was quite a surprise to see some called virtually the instant the polls closed. Here polls close at 10pm, and the results don't get beyond a trickle until about 1am. Then they come through thick and fast for a couple of hours, with the TV coverage zooming frantically from one vital count to another.

America has 50 states; the UK has over 600 parliamentary constituencies. Whereas the US has only a handful of important marginal states, there are many more marginal constituencies here ... and keeping track of the flurry of results is harder. The US results are simpler and clearer to watch.

The time zone effect surprised me. It was odd to realise that the overall election result was already obvious before voting had finished in some states.

Dreams

Last night I had my recurring dream. This is the third recurring dream I remember, and the only one of the three that has no obvious explanation. As a child and teenager I used to dream of fire, which was my greatest fear at the time. I remember going to the cinema as a teen to see Towering Inferno, of all things. What possessed me? I spent the entire time under the seat! This was the worst of my dreams. A nightmare.

In my twenties and thirties my recurring dream was a frantic effort to catch a train that I must catch in order to get somewhere important. As this was a time in my life when I travelled by train frequently, and I am not the world's best timekeeper, arriving at the station just as my train was pulling out was a regular occurrence. No surprise, then, that this translated into a "missing the train" dream.

In my forties, my recurring dream has been one in which I am exploring a new house. I am aware that I will be living there, although I am also apparently seeing it for the first time. The house differs from one dream to the next, but is always large and typically has an unusual layout with twists and turns. It is never a new house, but neither is it particularly old. Usually somewhere between Victorian and 1930s, I should think. It is a comfortable dream. I am always happy and excited to be in this new house, and any surprises as I explore new rooms are pleasant ones.

It is easily the most pleasant of my recurring dreams, but also the most mysterious. What does it mean, if anything? What bit of my subconscious is surfacing? I guess it may be a reflection of the domestic, home-based nature of my life these days. But why the new house? I am not a very introspective person, so there are probably things about myself that I am totally missing. Curious!

Lighthouses

I am still zooming randomly around my Cornish memories ...

When we stayed in St. Just Manse with my Aunt and Uncle I had a small bedroom at the front of the house with a large low south-west facing window. This meant I could lie in bed with the curtains open and watch the lighthouses as I fell asleep ... counting the reassuring flashes of those great lights beats counting sheep any day.

This stretch of Cornish coast must be almost unique as a lighthouse-spotting point, positioned as it is on a peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic and marking the northern edge of the English Channel. On a clear night I could see five or six (memory fails me on the exact number); two were almost always visible; and on the rare nights that they were blanketed in fog, there was the sound of the Pendeen foghorn. This interactive map from Trinity House (the Crown corporation that adminsters the major lights in the UK) shows the five lighthouses and one lightship in my line of sight. The lights were distinguishable by their different rhythms, and occasionally colours:

• Longships (Lands End) - red light 5 seconds on, 5 seconds off (this was my view, from other vantage points it could be a white light with the same phasing)
  
• Wolf Rock - white flash every 15 seconds
  
• Bishops Rock - two white flashes every 15 seconds
  
• Seven Stones Lightship - 3 white flashes, 5 seconds apart, every 30 seconds
  
• Peninnis, St.Mary's, Scilly Isles - white flash every 20 seconds
  
• Round Island, Scilly Isles (possibly, I'm not sure whether I could see this one or not) - white flash every 10 seconds
  

This website gives brief details and history of these and all the other South Coast lighthouses. Clicking through from the interactive map finds more detailed descriptions. Today they are all automated and lighthouse keepers are a thing of the past. Even the lightship is unmanned.

Longships and Wolf Rock were "my" lighthouses, and many nights I fell asleep to their soothing rhythm ... white flash / red glow, count, red glow / white flash, count, red glow, count, white flash / red glow ... and so on.

Pictures: Bishop Rock Light, Creative Commons photo by Jeremy Pearson; Longships Lighthouse, Creative Commons photo by Stuart100

Turning points

At the 4Real boards Cay flagged up this turning point post at Crazy Acres. The author talks about her feelings as her "baby" turns four, and the end of those baby days. I can relate! We are not finished with the "little things" yet: Little Cherub is still in a cot (crib), and nowhere close to climbing out; she is still nursing; we still have diapers and pushchairs and strapping into car seats and all those other things that merge babyhood into toddlerhood. But I have been thinking over the last couple of days how two seems a turning point here.

Two just isn't a baby any more. At two she is confidently mobile and her verbal skills are improving daily. She has her own opinions and is able to express them ("Mummy! No talk Daddy!" I got yesterday, when she decided I was paying too much attention to Tevye and not enough to her.) She wants to do things herself. She knows what she doesn't want to do. The baby has turned into a little girl.

Almost certainly she is my last baby, and those baby days are over for good. I have been there before - I have experienced my youngest being two, and four, and seven. I have mourned the loss of the baby days ... and then they came again. This time round the sense of loss is outweighed by the gratitude for my good fortune in getting to enjoy all these stages of childhood over again. The turning point is still bittersweet, but it is also a milestone. It marks a point on our journey, and while it is good to look back and remember with delight where we have been, it is more important to enjoy the view where we are and to look ahead.

This year the view looks quite different to last year. We have a toddler for whom life is a whole new adventure, a new teenager growing into a young lady, and a daughter about to hit double figures and the dramatic pre-teen changes that turn a child into an adolescent. But you know, it is a good view. Where we are is a good place. I can see a number of other milestones ahead. Some which once seemed a very long way ahead are coming into sight ... the teen years, children growing up and leaving home, retirement for Tevye. The challenge now is to meet those milestones with joy, to savour the turning points rather than to regret the loss of what went before.

The Girl Who Lived

Yesterday I took a gaggle of girls - my three and J-next-door - on a shopping expedition to a nearby town. Walking back to the train station afterwards I lagged behind the three older girls, pushing Little Cherub and a heap of bags. Watching them trotting along, animated and chatty, I thought about the miracle that is J, The Girl Who Lived.

Like The Boy Who Lived (apologies for the allusion if you are not a fan of Harry), J bears an scar. On her chest, put there by surgeons. Like Harry, protected by his mother's love, The Girl Who Lived did so because of the courage and love of her parents.

J was diagnosed in utero with a catastrophic heart malformation, which the doctors predicted would make life outside the womb impossible. If she survived long enough to be born, her first breaths would lead only to suffocation as the blood flooding through her severely enlarged arteries compressed her lungs. Terminate the pregnancy, said the doctors. It would be the best thing. The kindest thing. She can't survive.

I can hardly begin to imagine the courage it takes to struggle through the long, heavy months of pregnancy carrying a baby you know will die at birth. But, thank God, J's parents had the faith and courage to carry that burden. When the time came for the birth to be induced, they simply asked that it should not be on the same day as her brother's birthday - to celebrate the birth of one child and mourn the death of another on the same day would be too painful. And so two days later than originally planned, The Girl Who Would Die was born. And lived.

The doctors were right. J had exactly the heart defects they predicted. But against all the odds her little body fought back. The baby who should have been blue, silent and gasping for breath, was pink, crying and breathing. The doctors were able to wait until she was five months old before carrying out corrective surgery.

And now? J is a happy, active and sporty teenager; she performs lead roles with the local children's theatre group; she has a busy social life and many friends. She cooks. She shops (clothes!!!). Now and then she yells at her Mum. She would lose her head if it wasn't screwed on. She is Angel's very best friend. She lives!

Life? Life is precious. Even the tiniest, most hopeless of lives is precious. Love? Love means having the courage to nurture even the smallest flicker of life, to risk the pain of loss. And sometimes love of that magnitude can be rewarded with a miracle.

I know that.

I know The Girl Who Lived.

Introvert / Extrovert

This post by Amy Welborn on introverted parents of extroverted children got Melanie thinking about parenting her extroverted toddler, which in turn set my mental wheels in motion.

I have always registered as an extrovert (in the sense that being with others charges my batteries) on Myers-Briggs type tests. However over time the degree of extroversion has narrowed, and now only just tips the scales into extrovert rather than introvert - 53% according to the MyPersonality.info badge in my sidebar. Oddly, I've never before considered how this relates to my children.

Angel is an extreme extrovert. Sending her to school was like plugging her in to a high performance battery charger. Stamina? After a day at school, she is up for anything! Her need for company is intense, which at least means she is not likely to be prone to the teenage phase of lurking in her bedroom alone. Homeschooling an extreme extrovert can be a challenge. We were lucky in that a combination of neighbour children and after school activities provided enough social time to keep her going. In our earlier homeschooling years, I had the energy and enthusiasm to take her out and about regularly to a mix of organised activities and informal socialising. Now, with my own need for that social charge lessening, I'm not sure I could meet those needs so well.

Star is an introvert, though I have only now realised this. She comes home from school tired, which initially I assumed was just a matter of not having developed the stamina to cope with a long and busy day, but now I think it is the introvert's reaction to a long period with others. When she gets in, all she wants to do is slump in front of the TV ... and this seems to be the result of a real internal drive, not just inertia. Thinking in terms of personality types, I can now see it is her way of shutting out the world and giving herself the chance to recharge - a classic introverted response. If she was a book lover, this is where she would disappear into a book. As she is not, TV provides an alternative outlet. I suspect half the time she is not taking in what she is supposedly watching, it is just there as a block.

Whereas Angel will never miss out on any opportunity to socialise, it is not uncommon for Star to refuse the option of a get together with a friend. She often does enjoy being with others and has many friends, so I think we have fallen into the trap of not realising that social interaction drains her. She very much wants our company, but she wants it on her own terms - maybe this is because fitting in with someone elses preferences also drains her. Looking back on our homeschooling years, Star was often on the edge of, or outside, a group by her own choice. I put it down to her away-with-the-fairies personality, and had never twigged that people tire her. I wish I had realised this earlier, as there are things I would have done differently. Too often I assumed that what was good for Angel would also be good for Star. As it is, I think will help me respond better to her needs in future.

I'm not sure about Little Cherub. I think she is somewhere in the middle. She is certainly not another extreme extrovert. I can remember Angel getting the same buzz as a toddler from people - any people! anywhere! - that Melanie describes in Bella. That isn't Cherub. On the other hand, neither is she happy in her own world the way Star was as a toddler. She sits back and observes where Angel would have wanted to be in the centre of things. Star - again with hindsight - showed some sign of discomfort in group situations, but Cherub does not. Cherub is used to a much busier household and more people around than was the case with the other two, and I wonder how much difference this makes - my guess is that it may make her appear more extroverted. I'm going to watch with interest. My hunch is that she and I may currently be in much the same place - needing a few social outlets, but also happy with a lot of time at home or out and about by ourselves.

February Blues

The February Blues are a pretty common experience among homeschoolers. Guess what? I've discovered you don't have to be homeschooling to get them.

This month has definitely been a blue one. I haven't had to deal with schooling doldrums, but I have spent almost the entire month (and much of January) struggling with coughs and colds that triggered another bout the chronic asthma I had while pregnant with Little Cherub. Three inhalers later and it's finally back under control. Add in feeling generally run down and tired, and the keynote for the month has been inertia. I am way behind on my Eowyn Challenge.

Damp, grey February weather and a couple of cold snaps haven't helped. Or at least, that was my perception. According to yesterday's TV news this has been the sunniest February on record. It seems I must have been projecting my own greyness onto the climate! Damp and cold made my chest feel worse - and, I'm afraid, fit with my mood - so while everyone else was having a sunny February I was wallowing in my own cloudy one. I did notice a couple of warm, sunny, spring-like spells but I spent the best of them holed up indoors with a cold and they only impinged on the edges of my self-pitying consciousness.

This week I am finally feeling better. No longer coughing and puffing, and the tiredness has lifted. I have some energy back. Today we see the back of February (whose idea was it to add an extra day to my least favourite month?). Tomorrow is March. Spring is coming. Easter will soon be here.

Onwards and upwards!

Slow Time

I often find that different seasons interact... the chronological seasons, the liturgical seasons and my own life seasons. I always tend to lose momentum in the doldrums of winter - the February slump is a well known feature of homeschooling, and one of which I have plenty of experience. At the same time the Church is in an interval of Ordinary Time between the celebrations of Christmas and the spiritual astringency of Lent. But this year everything about my life has slowed ... right ... down. I am now in the middle of what I can only describe as Slow Time.

With the big girls in school, I am able to take life at toddler pace. Little Cherub is the least intrepid of small people and it has taken a long time for her to decide it is safe to walk outside. The first couple of times she tried she fell over, found the ground was hard and hurt, and it took another three months or so before she plucked up the courage to try again. (This is par for Little Cherub's course - she has only just decided it is safe to manouevre herself on and off a child size chair. She does not do climbing.) Last week, however, she decided she would like to walk to Grandma's - less than ten minutes on adult legs - and ... wow! ... she made it! Slowly. Very slowly.

I think this is the first time in my life that I have had both the time and the patience to go at this speed. Even when I have had the time, I haven't been ready to relax and allow myself to slow down. Now I am. Over the last few years the pace of life has varied from busy to hectic. Homeschooling is a hard option - good, and a route I'm glad I took, but hard - and the last couple of years had a series of added physical and emotional demands. Now here I am in my late forties at home with just a small toddler and not only slowed right down but enjoying it. Life is no longer a series of missed deadlines, many of them self-imposed and impossible. If it takes me forty minutes instead of ten to do a job because Cherub is helping, or because we stop in the middle to sing songs or watch squirrels, it doesn't matter. If she wants to walk and we go at a snail's pace, stopping to check out bricks, stones, puddles and leaves, that's fine. I'm in no rush.

After eight years of homeschooling this gentler, quieter, slower life is still very new. I am like a train that takes a mile to stop after the brakes are applied, and it is probably only in the last month that I have fully adjusted to the new pace. Over the last two or three weeks, slow has almost become stop thanks to coughs, colds and sore throats which have attacked me in various combinations. (Currently it is cough and cold. Sniffle.) But you know, it doesn't matter. It is winter; it is Ordinary Time; it is Slow Time. We can just hole up and take it easy until the coughs and sniffles go away.

Next week Lent begins. Easter and Spring will be just round the corner. What will happen to my Slow Time then? What is growing below the surface, I wonder? What new shoots will appear in the spring? For once I am not planning, just watching and waiting. What will my next season be?