280: the joy of text

I’ve just wandered over here from LinkedIn — as you do — where I have been reading a post about using em dashes — or not — in writing. Apparently they are an indicator that AI has written whatever it is you’re reading. This is most definitely not the case here, I assure you.

I am a big fan of an em dash. Emily Dickinson was a big fan of the em dash. My ex-line manager at London Museum was a big remover of my em dashes, bless his little cotton socks, although I could forgive him for that. (It was harder to forgive the director who used to uncapitalise ‘Second World War’ every time he saw it in my brochure text, despite the fact that it’s a specific historical event. He annoyed me.)

‘I’m nobody! Who are you?’ Emily Dickinson, em dash lover

In this blog I have usually used the en dash (-) instead of — purely because I write on a laptop and it doesn’t have a number pad which is what you need to insert the — symbol. To get your em dash on a laptop requires pressing the windows and full stop keys to bring up the emoji menu, and there’s a ‘special characters’ menu there. I may be a lover of the — but I’m also lazy, so please forgive my grammatical quirks.

Punctuation — as well as the words I wrap it around — may be one of my favourite things. When I write talks and sessions, especially if other people will be delivering them, using dashes (and parentheses) and the odd semi-colon make my writing more human, not less; giving life to words which are going to be spoken aloud. Can you imagine how dreary things would be if everything was short sentences and full stops, with no emphasis or asides?

At the other punctuational extreme is one of my all-time favourite poets, the wonderful e e cummings, more of whose work can be found here. A literary sort once said that his poetry transformed the word to transform the world. A lot of his poems use broken, scattered or run-on lines to create emphasis, such as the one above which featured in a school poetry anthology. He played with typography, space and shape to provide tone and punctuation, and — to paraphrase his response to a critic on one of his plays — wanted to know why people couldn’t just relax and see what happened rather than demanding to know what things mean all the time. My thoughts exactly.

When I left university in 1994, after 17 years of schooling of one kind or another, I decided that I was only going to read things I wanted to; I’d been asked to analyse dozens of texts and poems over the years which stripped all the joy out of the language and the stories. What I want to read may on occasion be considered as ‘literature’ (in at least the GCSE syllabus sense) but the point is that I’m reading it for the sheer joy of it. It took me another 20-odd years to be able to not finish a book I’d started if I wasn’t enjoying it but that’s a different matter. I am not picky about genre and a good trip to the library or the local Oxfam Books & Music takes in a wander around all the shelves and an eclectic haul.

This decision to read books based on interest has led me back to books like Graham Swift’s Waterland, which as a 17-year old A-level student I thoroughly disliked but as an adult I loved: I went back to it after visiting the Fens, where it’s set, and understood it far more. I was lucky enough not to have been made to read some of the classic GCSE and A-level texts – Gatsby, Mockingbird, Catcher – so came to them independently in the school library and loved them for themselves. I have a colleague who’s also an eclectic reader and we recommend books to each other – Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford, was a recommendation from him and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years. I tried another of Spufford’s books and couldn’t get into it at all, so I took it back to the library unfinished.

2026 has been named the National Year of Reading and the idea is to encourage a love of reading for pleasure. I think this is a great idea. However, I can’t help thinking that we — this is the policy-making, government-level, educational we, not a personal we — have spent the last 12 or so years building a generation which doesn’t love reading for a very good reason.

I have a cunning plan, though. Let’s refresh the National Curriculum and allow teachers to stop stripping texts back to their component parts from a very early age in school. Stop insisting on seeing sentences as no more than examples of spelling, punctuation and grammar and then children might start to love reading for its own sake. Teachers might also be happier.

Let’s put storytelling back into teacher training courses and make it a compulsory part of the school day. Let’s dedicate some time in colleges and on SCITT schemes to sessions with professional storytellers like Olivia Armstrong and show teachers how to bring a story to life with your voice. Help them share the joy of the language and the rhymes and the jokes; the sad bits and the happy bits and the sheer pleasure of being transported to a different world for half an hour at the end of the school day. Give teachers the confidence to do the accents and the voices and to pull the faces, and leave the children wanting more – perhaps to pick up the book themselves and have a go without seeing every sentence as a challenge or a task to be completed. If a teacher isn’t confident, there’s audio books galore out there read by people who are paid to do the voices. David Tennant read a CD of all the Hairy McLairy books and it’s wonderful. Hugh Grant reading Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And Michael Sheen reading – well, anything, up to and including a shopping list, but start with Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust.

I wrote last month about Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s campaign as Children’s Laureate to make hearing stories part of every child’s life, and this leads on from that: give them joy not grammar. Teach them to love words, and their vocabulary will expand as a result. They’ll see punctuation as they read and will learn to use it as they go, and I guarantee you they won’t even realise they’re learning it. Tell them about libraries, where they let you take books away to read and have thousands of different ones, and they’ll never be short of entertainment. Even better, tell them about librarians, as the good ones will be able to suggest books and the really good ones will know what to read when they’ve finished that one. They’ll be unstoppable.

Things making me happy this week

A good ramble through the fields on Saturday morning, except for the bit where I got lost and my legs got shredded by fierce brambles.
This rainbow bunny – it’s the Toft Emma pattern again from Ed’s Menagerie.

Untamed – a new Netflix series with Eric Bana, Sam Neill and excellent scenery.
New haircut
End of term for Thing 3, so I don’t have to make sure he’s out of bed for a few weeks before I leave for work
A crocheted meerkat from a pattern by Planet June

That’s it from me. If no one minds, I’ll be reading my book.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Blood Debt/Summon the Keeper/The Second Summoning – Tanya Huff

Between the Stops – Sandi Toksvig

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

Edgelands – Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts

279: not in my name

It’s been a fair while since I’ve been quite so consumed with rage as I have this week, so you lucky readers get to read my rant about what’s been going on in our local town. If you’re a right-leaning, Reform-voting person who uses the actions of one person to launch a sanctimonious ‘we’re-not-racist-we-just-want-to-protect-our-children’ protest then you may wish to go and read something else. Perhaps the Daily Mail or the Express. The Torygraph probably has too many long words, though I concede that they do have a good crossword. Anyway.

I have written before about the experiences I have had with refugees and asylum seekers through my previous job and at my local primary school. I met many children from Somalia and Angola when I was first teaching in London: a significant number of whom had no idea (as four and five year olds) whether their parents were dead or alive as their parents had sent them away with an aunt or a friend to give them a chance to grow up. I’ve met more people recently through a work project.

Without exception every single one of them has been friendly, open, grateful to have reached somewhere they might feel safe and where they are ekeing out survival. One thing that’s been made clear to me through many conversations is that leaving their homes and putting their own and their families lives in mortal danger was not a choice they made lightly. Can you imagine being in a position where your only choices were certain or uncertain death and what it must cost you to make that choice?

In our Essex village there is a contingency hotel where families seeking asylum have been housed for several years now. Prior to that it was being used by Redbridge Council as emergency housing. It’s an old Travelodge and even when it was being used as a ‘proper’ hotel it was getting one-star reviews. Five star it aint. An asylum seeker set fire to it a few months ago. There was a crowdfunder started by a local secondary school to help the children housed at the hotel find accommodation close to the school so their GCSEs weren’t disrupted, and it was very well-supported. The accused arsonist tried, a week or so later, to set a similar fire in the Bell Hotel, Epping (this one has 2.7 stars) and he was arrested.

The Bell Hotel, Epping, has been used to house single male asylum seekers for about the same amount of time and under the same conditions. One of these asylum seekers – just one, although that’s more than enough – tried to kiss a teenage girl in Epping, and attempted to do the same to a woman. He’s been arrested and remanded in custody. This is right, as no one has the right to assault girls or women or men or boys or anyone else. It’s also probably saved him from serious injury at the hands of the locals, who have used this occurrence as an excuse for two violent protests and some vandalism and abuse in the ten days since, under the banner of ‘Epping has had enough’, with another one planned for today. The actions of one man are being used as an excuse to target and uproot the lives of hundreds of other people at these two hotels.

Well, I’d had enough when my teenage daughter was assaulted by the owner of a local business a couple of years ago and no one* felt the need to riot and protect the women and children of North Weald….but then the only border he’d crossed in the past few years was the one between Hertfordshire and Essex. Perhaps that made a difference?

Last Sunday there was a ‘peaceful protest’ at the hotel in Epping, which caused all sorts of traffic issues. Peaceful, that is, being a relative term: I’m sure the two hotel security guards who were beaten up and left with severe injuries when they got off the bus to start their shift might disagree. On Thursday there was another protest which most certainly wasn’t peaceful. Here’s the callout which went on Facebook:

The ‘leftys’ and ‘antifa’ they mention were a contingent from Hope Not Hate – not well-known for inflicting ‘violence and anger’ as far as I am aware unless smiting the enemy with well-reasoned research-backed arguments and workshops counts. And of course the far right element turned up, including known members of Far Right groups travelling from wider Essex and East London, and the ‘peaceful protest’ degenerated. Eight police officers were injured. These ‘peaceful protesters’ in balaclavas were attacking police vans and throwing things. They were using fireworks. Presumably these balaclava-sporting thugs are the same people who object to women wearing hijab. It strikes me that if you’re going to attend a protest for peaceful reasons, you probably ought to be brave enough to show your face and not be carrying, say, a blunt instrument and a smoke bomb or two.

The head of the local council has organised a petition to get the hotels shut down. Local councillors – including the execrable one from Ongar who was ejected from the Tories, became independent and is now in Reform – hand delivered a letter to the Home Secretary saying much the same. The local MPs are burbling away on the subject – Tory, of course, since a monkey in a blue suit could stand for parliament round here and get elected. The only time I have ever queued at the polling station was for the Brexit referendum, and look what happened there.

Apparently it’s all Keir Starmer’s fault, even though the Home Office have been using the hotels for the same purpose for more than five years. Social media is full of people complaining that these asylum seekers are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive at (this is not the case – neither the 1951 Refugee Convention or international law require a person to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach, although the UK government would prefer it if they did); that they’re living in five star hotels (patently not the case) at the expense of local people who can’t get housing; and so on and so forth.

Social media is also full of people choosing to post anonymously. People going on about women and children not feeling safe on the streets of Epping. People claiming that all the violence was the police’s fault for not sending the ‘leftys and antifa’ back on the train and, in one case, giving them a lift to the hotels in their van. People accusing the police of ‘treason’ for throwing ‘the flag of Britain’ in a hedge. It was the St George’s flag so presumably the poster failed geography at school and also hasn’t been informed that old Georgie-boy was a resident of the Middle East and never set foot in England. Accusing the police of a hit and run, as they allegedly drove into a protestor who was sitting in the road.

Well, the only time I haven’t felt safe on the streets of Epping was this week, quite honestly. I lived in Epping for 12 years and we’ve been in North Weald for another 12. I walk alone for literally miles and have never felt worried. On Sunday I had to wait for a connecting bus home and wasn’t happy about that as we’d just come past the Bell on the rail replacement bus and had seen the police presence. On Thursday we were held on the train at Theydon Bois while the police dealt with an incident on the station, and I was reassured to see the heavy police presence on the station. I was less reassured – quite pissed off, in fact – to see the fear on the faces of the family who got on the bus with me. There’s a look about the people coming to the hotels: nervous, worried that they’re getting on the wrong bus, small scared children hanging onto one parent or other, a buggy laden with bags of possessions. Their fear makes me angry.

I feel terribly sorry for the teenager and the woman who were assaulted in Epping, of course I do. I am angry, however, that their experience is being used as an excuse for racism and violence against an equally vulnerable section of society. The people of Epping, if they genuinely want to make the streets safe for women and children, should perhaps volunteer for a rape crisis charity, or for Shelter, or for an organisation that does some good instead of allowing themselves to be allied with thugs and scum.

*except me, obvs. And my friends.

Things that did make me happy this week (yes, there were some)

Crocheting Prince for one of my oldest friends
Crocheting a long-eared bunny
Going to the monthly Dog Swim at Redricks with Sue and the Bella-Dog. Quite honestly the most joyous event ever. All the humans in the water and the dogs occasionally fetching a ball to humour them
The blackbird in the garden who sings the first six notes of Elton John’s ‘Passenger’
Baby badgers bumbling in the bushes
Our second access panel meeting
A lovely evening at the Quentin Blake: Ninety Drawings exhibition. I got to chat to Axel Scheffler who is a delight.
Day two of WXSP – less hot!

This week Thing 3 breaks up for the summer holidays, which he is pleased about. So am I.

Same time next week, gang!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Rosemary and Rue – Seanan McGuire

Blood Debt – Tanya Huff

Stone and Sky – Ben Aaronovitch (and Amongst Our Weapons/Lies Sleeping/False Value/Rivers of London on Audible)

Between The Stops – Sandi Toksvig

278: girls’ night out

On Tuesday Things 1 and 2 got the train into London and we had a grown-up girls’ night out. It’s the first time we’ve done this, and we had a most excellent evening in Islington.

They chose Nando’s for dinner and afterwards we walked up to New River Head where I smushed history into their brains whether they wanted any or not. I showed them the historic graffiti in Myddelton Passage, and Clerkenwell Green, and nice houses in old streets, and then we went to the ballet.

Sadlers Wells had sent an email out with free tickets for Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet and two colleagues had given it rave reviews after seeing it the previous week. I’ve never been to a ballet before, and neither have the girls, so we weren’t sure what to expect. We were in the stalls, so we had a good view (give or take a few tall people) and the girls were absolutely rapt from the first moment. To be fair, so was I. It was magical.

The set was minimal and whizzed on and off the stage in a surprisingly elegant fashion. The costumes by Paul Smith were sharp and the music – by Townshend’s wife Rachel Fuller – echoed The Who’s originals. The set was enhanced by gorgeous, atmospheric projections – condensation on diner windows, the sea at Brighton, dramatic city scenes. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the film but the story of Jimmy came through strongly. We did the evening properly, with a programme and ice creams in the interval, and I think the girls enjoyed the whole experience.

Thing 2 turned to me at the interval and said, ‘Mum, this is SO GOOD!’ and Thing 1 told me she LOVED it. High praise indeed. The length of the voice messages T2 was leaving for her friends afterwards was a dead giveaway, too, and I think they’d like to go again. I know I do! It was SO GOOD and I LOVED not just the ballet but a night out with my beautiful girls.

It’s been a very educational week all round, really. I’ve had two days in schools testing the new STEM x local history session. Chris, Toni and SJ have done four days – with Chris in Victorian kit as ‘Charles’ and Toni and SJ in hard hat and hi vis as ‘Emma’, our modern day engineer. We’ve been in classrooms and playgrounds, worked with 240 kids and and generally had an excellent time. It’s been so much fun watching the sessions develop – adding in new interactive sections and tweaking others. It’s definitely better in a large area like a playground or hall, especially when the 30 small people are being used to demonstrate the workings of a pump with three umbrellas and a lot of masking tape. I interviewed some of the kids at the end of one session and the message was that they loved the activeness and all the props, wanted the rest of the school to join in, and requested that we brought a person from the future in as well so they could compare that too. I promised I’d see what I could do…

The format we’re using – someone appearing from the past to compare and contrast similar projects with a modern engineer – is one that Chris and I have used successfully in the past at Museum of London Docklands when our modern engineer encountered Isambard Kingdom Brunel. On that occasion we compared the Thames Tunnel and the Thames Tideway project, and used the children to model the Greathead Shield and how to dig into sand safely. One of our more challenging hosts spoke to me afterwards and said ‘well, I get that Brunel was an actor, but how did you get a real engineer to come and do this?’. I took that as a win, and one teacher said that it was the best session they’d ever been to.

This time round we’re including illustrations – and bringing them to life with the pump activity – such as ‘Monster Soup’, No Fishing and No Swimming signs (communication without language), and a portrait of Hugh Myddelton and his excellent beard. There’s also umbrellas, ping pong balls, lengths of piping, beads, buckets, pinwheels and high vis jackets. There’s the story of the king falling into the frozen New River, Charles Dickens complaining that he pays for a large cistern but never has enough water for a bath, and – Chris, we missed one! The complaints from the people in Pall Mall when they found live eels in their pipes! We’re testing with some older children next week – I wonder whether they’ll ask such good questions?

Other things making me happy this week

A crochet project I can’t show you yet as it’s a surprise
A much-needed evening swim with Sue – the water was 26.4 and balmy, the ducks were flipping up and down feeding in the weeds and the little shoals of fish were zooming about in the shallows
Ice lollies.
Cally Fest last Sunday – it rained and it shined, we saw almost 300 people and a lot of cute dogs. This weekend its Whitecross Street Party, and we have a great activity planned. I’ve given strict instructions to the team to slather on the Factor 50 as it’s going to be HOT.
An excellent conversation with the black cab driver today about the New River – he grew up on Amwell Street and now lives in Enfield and runs along the New River Path every day.
Whitecross Street Party!

This week we have the second of our community access panel meetings, and I’m really looking forward to next weekend… and a couple of days off after 12 straights days of work.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Blood Lines/Blood Pact/Blood Debt – Tanya Huff

Amongst Our Weapons/False Value – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The Wild Life – John Lewis-Stempel

277: just a little off the leg please

As my children never tire of reminding me, I am not blessed with height. At very nearly 5’4″ to their 5’7″ and above (and rising) I am resigned to this. I am, as I tell them often, of average height, so – in the old days (ie before children) I used to be pretty confident that I could buy a pair of trousers or a skirt from H&M or New Look etc and they would be the right length. (The Office of National Statistics informs me that I have, in fact, been above average height until 2022. Ha!)

Something over the last twenty years has changed, however, and I know it’s not me because last time I was at the hospital I got measured with my shoes off by someone who knows what they’re doing. Now, any pair of ‘regular’ length trousers I buy needs a minimum of 12cm removed from the leg length before they are wearable, and I wear my trousers floor length as it is. This is the case across all retailers. When you google ‘changes in women’s clothing sizes’ a lot of results come back about vanity sizing but this more usually applies to bust and waist measurements. Even the fashion for wearing wide legs (also a favourite style of mine) with heels or flatforms doesn’t account for regular length trousers now covering my feet and flappping about like an illustration from The Shrinking of Treehorn. A midi dress is now almost ankle length, midaxis are loooong and maxis are a staircase accident waiting to happen. If miniskirts are truly a sign of a booming economy, I dread to think what hemlines are indicating right now.

So, this week I decided I’d try a ‘short’ size (from Tu) in the hope that this might solve the problem. Readers, it did not. The ‘short length’ linen trousers covered half my feet and the ‘cropped’ jeans were resting just under my ankles. ‘Muu-uum, that’s the right length for jeans,’ said Thing 1 as I wailed about this, until I pointed out that these were supposed to finish well above the ankle, at which point she reminded me that I was short and offered to take the jeans off my hands for me (no).

How do below-average-height people deal with this nonsense? I’m pretty handy with a sewing machine so can take my own trousers up, but – as I am average height – I shouldn’t have to, as ‘regular’ should surely mean that they take the average as the norm. What’s going on with people’s legs in the fashion industry’s mind?? Answers on a postcard to the usual address, and I’ll try not to trip over my trousers when I go to collect the post.

Things making me happy this week

A gorgeous swim at Guidel-Plage followed by an excellent lunch with the family. Just look at the colour of that sky.
Watching the swifts zooming around the French neighbour’s house, stopping in to feed the babies and zooming off again. Excellent entertainment while sipping rose spritzers, nibbling brie and baguettes with ancienne crisps. Also zooming around were Asian Yellow-legged Hornets, so now we know how to report them in France but luckily not in French. My French continues badly.

A fun morning meeting VI formers at Stoke Newington School’s careers event. The students were confident, friendly individuals who were being allowed to express themselves. Late students in reception were met with sympathy because of the heat, no detentions were being handed out and kids were helpful and welcoming. Some academy trusts could learn from this (not the one my kids go to!)
There’s a decorative section of the New River in Clissold Park over the road from SNS, complete with noisy coot chicks shouting at their mama.
A completely amazing day of rehearsing the new schools session before launch on Monday across several Islington schools. Props include umbrellas, masking tape, a lot of buckets, beads, ping pong balls, drainpipes, hi viz and a hard hat. My role was to pretend to be a seven year old and throw daft answers at the team to see what they’d do. At least, that’s what I was doing.
One of the actresses said Chris and I make an excellent double act – but then our first conversation about a zillion years ago encompassed ladies of negotiable affection, Doctor Who, shipworms, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, how to demonstrate the physics of the St Paul’s dome with a small trampoline, and we’ve just gone on from there.

Today marks the start of a few weeks of non-stop work, kicking off with the Cally Festival in Islington where we’ll be talking about the Centre, getting people excited about the project and highlighting one of our fabulous community projects. Last year it thundered and lightninged at Cally and we all had to cram under the gazebo, so let’s hope this year is dry as we only have a market stall.

Same time next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Blood Trail/Blood Price/Blood Banked/Blood Shot/Blood Lines – Tanya Huff

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)

The Wild Life – John Lewis-Stempel

276: going somewhere nice for dinner

…was actually a sneaky way of saying that I was off to France with Tan for the weekend. The parents knew she was going but not me.

Tan and I had an excellent Japanese dinner at Hare and Tortoise in Ealing on Wednesday night, then headed for Gatwick on Thursday morning. Volotea, a Spanish carrier, has started flying twice weekly to Brest.

The cabin staff were extremely efficient and – this is important – did not spend the entire flight trying to sell us scratch cards/lottery tickets/duty free/food. There was a menu accessed by a QR code, so you could eat if you wanted, but no hard sell.

You can’t check in online, so there was a bit of a queue, but the team were smiling and friendly and efficient.

These mice were the outcome of the flight and a slight delay…

When we arrived at the parents’ house Tan sent me up the drive while she reversed the hire car up the tricky drive, so I wandered into the house… mum spotted me first and then dad appeared to say ‘that’s not the daughter I was expecting!’

In the evening we went to the pizza place in the local town – the thinnest base and hugest pizza, followed by an excellent coupe tatin ice cream – vanilla and caramel ice creams, cooked apple slices and cream.

Friday was spent admiring French bakery and vegetables, napping and then going for a walk along the canal where there were hordes of swallows and noisy coypu in the lagoon.

On Saturday – before the predicted heatwave – we headed off to Port-Louis where the sun was starting to break through. We had a mooch around the market where we were beguiled by the smells of the strawberries and fresh produce, and then headed to the beach where I hopped into the sea for a quick dip.

Lunch was at the restaurant on the beach, where we had very fresh fish and chips (tuna for Tan, mackerel for me, something battered for the parents) followed by café gourmand all round – Far Breton, crême brulée, and salted caramel glace.

Today’s plan may be to hit a different beach in the morning so the less hardy among us can go in the sea too, and then hide from the promised heat.

Other things making me happy this week

This week was Thing 2’s prom, so I can at last share photos of the skirt we made!

Reading the latest Joanne Harris novel, Vianne – a prequel to Chocolat and magical as ever.

That’s it, I think – I have a busy few weeks coming up at community festivals and testing a new school session! All very exciting…

Same time next week…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Edgelands – Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley

La Vie/The Wild Life – John Lewis-Stempel

Golden Hill – Francis Spufford

Vianne – Joanne Harris

Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

275: A-team, eat your heart out

A grey cat lying on paving slabs with some strawberry plants

I’m writing this sitting in the garden shelter in my bathers late Saturday morning. I am writing it now so I can schedule it for tomorrow morning as I may have melted in the 33 degree heat predicted for this afternoon. It’s been getting steadily hotter all week, and the garden shelter has become my office on my WFH days which has been a blessing as the house has been baking. Bailey’s chosen sleeping spot this week has been plastered against the north east corner wall where it’s cool as the sun never gets into it. Lulu, on the other hand, keeps lying in the sweltering conservatory and looking at me accusingly although there is a perfectly good hard floor in the kitchen she’d be cooler on. She’s not allowed out unsupervised as she swears at Ziggy and last week made it into the neighbour’s garden. Ted is making his displeasure known through the medium of loud miaows.

The shelter was formerly known as ‘under the treehouse’, before the kids stopped using the treehouse because of the spiders and my Beloved cut down the tree because it (a planted Christmas tree from his childhood which had grown enormous) was blocking the solar panels. It’s been one of those projects that, in the words of designerly types, just kept iterating.

The original plan was a small crows nest that the kids could climb up to, but then they got involved and it was big enough to have a small picnic table, some shelves, a crows nest rigged from an old Ercol chair, rigging and a roof. It was bigger than my kitchen. Then Thing 1 and her dad designed a seat underneath made from an old wooden bed frame, and gradually one of the sides got enclosed. The deck underneath it was extended to the edge of where the strawberries and fruit trees live in the winter and the pool in the summer.

The original treehouse with Thing 2 in the crows nest

When the original tree and treehouse came down the platform stayed, although he raised it a foot or so. A green roof was installed with succulents to attract wildlife. Then last year one of our neighbours, who knows of my Beloved’s penchant for recycling, brought over a conservatory which was being removed from a posh house refurb. The doors and windows have been fitted to the shelter so we can sit surrounded by greenery but sheltered from the weather. It’s got quite a nice half-timbered effect at the back and cladding on the corner now too.

This year, he’s added a slanting roof to the front to replace the sailcloth canopies we’ve had in previous summers as they’re never square and always collect rain in a dip in the middle. My role was to remove the plastic protection from the powder coated panels before they went up, and occasionally to have an opinion (something I am quite good at, unlike DIY). Last weekend we rigged a sailcloth along the front for shade for the babies during the Father’s Day BBQ and this has now become a cunningly rolled curtain. I confidently expect to come back one day and find out that it’s been extended to meet the house so the furry thugs can access it via a Great Escape style tunnel from their catio. (He’s just informed me that he’s bought some coolpads for the cats, so this isn’t too much of a stretch.)

I came home from work yesterday and it was full of teenagers celebrating the of their GCSEs with a sleepover (9 of them!) and today it’ll be full of family which is always lovely. I love having a houseful, especially if I am not required to feed them.

Other things making me happy this week

Evidence that the fox is still on site at New River Head, having a good explore of the new concrete floors
Calippos
Getting all the schools booked in for piloting the new school sessions – and remembering just why I used to appreciate Brian and the box office at times like this. Eight days of delivery, eight different schools, three facilitators and one me….
Surviving Thing 2’s GCSEs. Two down, one to go…
Tom Hiddleston dancing. I am shallow.
The day I came home from work and the ice cream van arrived at the same time, followed by a dip in the pool
Air con in the office
Finishing Thing 2’s prom skirt – and she loves it, luckily. She’s going to look beautiful (of course) but also unique as she’s brave enough to make her own fashion choices.
A Solstice swim on Saturday evening – the lake was 27.4 degrees this week
Picnic food. I’m on catering strike.
Making a sensible decision not to train this weekend

This week I’m going to be 52 (how???) and I am planning on going somewhere nice for dinner, especially if this heatwave continues.

Same time, same place next week, unless I have MELTED.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

City of Ghosts/The Dream Thief/Dark Waters – Violet Fenn

La Vie – John Lewis-Stempel

Vianne – Joanne Harris

Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)

274: cat among the pigeons

On Friday it was soooo muggy that I gave up on indoors and spent the afternoon working in the garden shelter, watched occasionally by next door but one’s cat Ziggy and some pigeons. Not at the same time though, as Zig has a well-founded reputation as a mighty hunter and has been plotting to poach our roof-pigeons for quite some time. He sits on our conservatory roof and watches them, and they peer down at him from the guttering. One day he’ll make the leap…

He’s a very beautiful ginger tom who – like all animals – is a sucker for my Beloved and also for the nepeta planted near our pond. The pictures above are a before and after set for his plant love-in. The Chinese rhubarb on the other side of the pond is considerably less battered as Ziggy and the occasional other cat visitor doesn’t luxuriate in it. The nepeta was almost completely demolished but is making a comeback. As long as they leave the newt who has recently taken up residence in the pond alone they can keep the plants!

The pigeons, on the other hand, were mostly side-eyeing me as they stripped the blackcurrant bush of pretty much every last currant. I don’t mind this as we never really do anything with them other than make blackcurrant vodka if there’s enough, and also if they’re nicking the currants they’re not eating the strawberries. I am mostly eating the strawberries and the raspberries: there is nothing like a perfectly ripe strawberry picked in the sunshine and eaten still warm.

The promised thunderstorms scheduled for Friday afternoon and evening failed to appear, though it is at least a bit fresher with some breezes. Today we have the family round for a Father’s Day barbecue, which is causing me to wonder why I am supposed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what was put in the freezer after the last barbecue in April.

Other things making me happy this week

Surrendering to the Force and giving last week’s pangolin a lightsabre. FINE, he needed one
A surprise visit from young H who’d forgotten her keys and knows there’s safe haven at my house, even though she and Thing 3 are sworn enemies
A visit to the National Portrait Gallery to chat all things programming
An excellent CPD on on object handing at UAL, where we got to see some excellent archival material including a pair of tights made for Grayson Perry

A full moon swim at Redricks Lake on Wednesday night – the water was hovering about 20 degrees, and I was feeling lazy so I mostly dipped and enjoyed the atmosphere. It’s always so pretty with the fairy lights.

And that’s it from me for the week – I’m off for a swim this morning to set me up for the day, then a bit of sewing to finish the prom dress before the hordes descend!

A happy Father’s Day to my excellent dad, too! He may need to re-register his Kindle as apparently we can no longer buy Amazon.com e-gift cards to be sent outside the US.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Anna Again/My Favourite Mistake – Marian Keyes

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

The Gilded Nest – Sarah Painter

Earl Crush/Ne’er Duke Well – Alexandra Vasti

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason – India Holton

A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch – Sarah Hawley

Hex Appeal/Hex and the City/Hex and Hexability – Kate Johnson

273: stories are a superpower

A selection of illustrated children's books

On Wednesday I attended – from the comfort of my living room – a session of the What Next? culture group. This is a wide-ranging, first-thing-in-the-morning, ‘free-to-access movement that brings together small and large organisations and freelancers to debate and shape arts & culture in the UK’. I don’t get to attend them very often as Wednesdays are usually my later-into-the-office days due to teenager wrangling responsibilities.

Anyway, this week’s was about the power and importance of reading to small children from a very early age. One of the speakers was the Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce who pledged at the start of his Laureateness (Laureacy?) to campaign to reduce reading inequality through the Reading Rights campaign. The first report has recently been published, calling on national and local leaders in early years, health, education and culture to come together and make reading a part of daily life for every child in the first seven years of life.

Mr C-B spoke about visiting the Babylab at Queen Mary’s in East London, where he watched in real time as a mother and baby were wired up to a brainwave thingy and the mother read a story to the baby on her knee. The act of being read to by a loved one visibly calmed the baby’s chaotic brain waves, their heart rate, and their breathing came into sync. He called it ‘love at a synaptic level’. From this mum’s point of view, too, there is nothing quite like the feeling of a warm, sleepy baby or toddler snuggling in for a story at the end of the day. I recognise, too, that the act of reading is also a privilege.

According to BookTrust’s research, 95% of families know that reading is really important but only 42% of children in lower-income families get a regular bedtime story. There are a whole lot of reasons for that – aside from parents possibly not having that experience themselves as a child, or lacking the confidence in their own reading skills to read a story ‘properly’ – but a key reason is that living in poverty or need is really, really hard. You spend time in meetings with benefits people. You spend time getting to places on public transport getting to meetings or the supermarket with the cheapest food, or on hold to government organisations, or sorting out housing, or working one or more minimum wage jobs, or worrying about your electric or gas or other bills. All this as well as caring for your small person…. the mental bandwidth this all takes up is enormous and things like bedtime stories aren’t always top of the list. Survival is.

Those of us who grew up with being read to nightly – and, with the benefit of younger siblings to listen in on later – for many years are lucky. I did the same with my own children – I was certainly still reading chapter books to my reluctant reader Thing 2 when she was eight or nine and Things 1 and 3 were listening in. M.M.Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess was a favourite, as was Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark which we took on holiday and I read a chapter a night to my three and my niece. Bedtime story time was one of the joys of being a parent, honestly, even when I was in the depths of PND and could barely function. It was a moment of peace and routine in what were some very hard days, but then books are my own go-to moment of sanity as an adult so this makes sense for me. Admittedly there were days when the fifth or sixth reading of the same book got a little wearing, but there we are.

Cottrell-Boyce also made the excellent point that children who aren’t read to at home then encounter books for the first time when they get to school and they’re suddenly being asked to sit down and decode things they have no experience of. Books become difficult and scary, and not something to be experienced as a joy: these children aren’t making the connection between the words in front of them and the pictures on the page because they don’t have the literacy capital to do so. He likened this experience of reading as being presented with a recipe to cook before you have ever experienced food – the pain without the pleasure, as it were. Illustrations are the first encounters with visual art that children have. Illustration – as I say a lot to people in my day job – is art with a job to do, it’s art that communicates.

The wonderful BookTrust are working with Cottrell-Boyce on this campaign. The BookStart scheme, which provides families with free books via health visitors and libraries, is the last man standing from the brilliant SureStart scheme that was one of the great successes of the New Labour government. Early Years provision has been steadily eroded over the last 14 years which has removed an enormous and incredibly important level of support from the people who desperately needed it. Increasing free childcare is all very well, (before someone says ‘but they’re doing this for parents’) but – in reality – that’s aimed at getting adults back into work and isn’t a benefit for the family. The other problem with increasing free childcare provision, of course, is that it’s not properly funded so early years settings are closing as they can’t actually afford to pay the staff to provide the care. That’s a rant for another day, however – another conversation this week was about the cost of childcare.

In our local Tesco’s they have a ‘free children’s books’ stand by the checkouts, which is brilliant – adult books are offered for a donation but for small people they are free. There are Little Free Libraries popping up in disused phone boxes and bus shelters and train stations. Libraries – thank the lord – are still free and anyone can use them, even if (like my local one) they’re only open two days a week. Librarians – a big shout out to this amazing bunch of people – still do free RhymeTime or Storytime sessions. But if people haven’t grown up with libraries as part of their lives they may not have the confidence to go in – like museums and galleries, there’s an ‘is this for me?’ barrier to get through. I’m not sure what the answer is, but this campaign might be a good start. I’m in a position to be part of the change as I start to plan what our Early Years and Families programme will look like when we open in 2026: there has always been a plan for regular storytime, sharing books and illustrations with our visitors, but now I can back it up with science and stuff. Hurray!

Things making me happy this week

A catch up with Emma T on Friday, covering cats, small people, and what’s going on in the world of museum research. She’d been to Cardiff the weekend before to visit a mutual friend, and she also got to meet one of my force-of-nature cousins. Honestly, we are EVERYWHERE.
An afternoon at Copped Hall last Sunday, chasing around the GT2. I am out of practice at the toddler thing!
Salad. I like salad. A lot.
This Pangolin amigurumi – I love pangolins! They always look like they need to tell you something very important.

A happy commuter moment on Friday when I was crocheting on the tube, finishing off a little apple amigurumi. A family opposite me were off on a day trip and the little girl was very excited watching me give the apple a leaf and a mouth. When I’d finished it I gave her the apple and I think it made my day. They were off to Paddington Station to see the bear statue and then to see the Natural History Museum, so I extracted a solemn promise that she’d say hello to Paddington and give him a marmalade sandwich. ‘We’ve GOT marmalade sandwiches!’ she said in very serious tones. I hope they had a good day – I know I did after this joyful exchange.
The strawberries coming ripe in the garden in large quantities.
Meeting Oliver Jeffers, who wrote one of our all-time favourite bedtime stories. I probably should be a bit more chilled about these things by now but I’m not. I was very well behaved though.

Things I am withholding judgement on this week include Thing 2’s prom skirt which she had a very clear plan for and which I am making from duchesse satin with an embroidered tulle overskirt, and (of course) pockets. I may try and negotiate on the pockets and provide a matching wrist bag instead. She also wants a ‘train’ so no one can see her feet, despite the invention of shoes. I’m glad I fitted a tissue paper toile on her yesterday morning as the size we’d printed going on her measurements wasn’t big enough, so I could reprint at the next size up and do another fit check before cutting the fabric. I’ve bought from this designer before and have always had to contact her about missing instructions, or fabric quantities, and the instructions always assume a lot of prior knowledge so I wouldn’t buy from her as a beginner. The one moment of joy (for me, at least) is that she was hoping a pair of my glam and presumably now vintage heels would fit her but NO, they’re all too small. Actually – I’m also quite joyful that she bought the corset top and didn’t ask me to make that. She had a very clear idea about what she wanted to wear, and what colour, and of course she couldn’t find the perfect thing in the shops… this summer I will be teaching her to use a sewing pattern. It would have been more helpful if she’d stayed home with me so I could start sewing, but nooooooo…..that’s my day gone today then!

Things not making me happy this week include the doctor’s surgery. By Wednesday evening I had spent more than two hours on hold to the surgery just waiting to speak to the reception team. Phone call one had been in mid-May, where I’d asked for a prescription to be updated to reflect an increase in my medication prescribed by their out of hours doc. The surgery just reissued the existing prescription. Phone call two – Monday – repeated request. They texted me and said the prescription had been issued. Chemist says yes but it’s two separate prescriptions so you need to pay twice, phone the surgery again and ask for them to be issued as a single script. Phone call three – explain again that I don’t actually want to pay £20 for what’s basically one prescription, could they issue this as one script with the full dose on it. This apparently made sense to me and the receptionist, but not to the doctor whose response – not to me, of course – was that they don’t make 30mg pills. I discovered this in phone call four, which was where I channelled my inner Dad and explained that I was FINE taking a 20mg and a 10mg tablet at the same time but I’d rather not be charged twice. Yes, said the receptionist, I understand and it shouldn’t have taken this many phone calls. Phone call five after waiting for eight hours wasn’t answered after 1 hr 40 minutes even though surgery was open. Phone call six, the following morning, was with YET ANOTHER receptionist (how many do they have?) who was adamant that what I was asking couldn’t be done even though I’d been assured that it could by our amazing village pharmacist – who presumably knows what can and can’t be done with a prescription and who I’d phoned in sheer desperation. He offered to send a note to the surgery explaining the problem in case it helped. I asked to speak to a doctor, who phoned me back two hours later, and three minutes and three seconds later (including pleasantries) I had the prescription, it was sent to the chemist and was ready for me when I tumbled through their door four minutes before closing. It should not have been so hard….

So, I am fully medicated, and today I will be finishing the prom skirt (I hope!). Watch this space…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Shadowlands – Matthew Green

Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel

Between the Stops – Sandi Toksvig

Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)

Greetings from Bury Park – Sarfraz Manzoor (Audible)

272: a walk on the wild side

Over the last few weeks I have been immersing myself in the Herefordshire countryside courtesy of the writings of John Lewis-Stempel who farms in the border hills (Merrily country, for fans of the late Phil Rickman) and who writes beautiful prose about the most prosaic of things. Who would have thought – speaking as someone bored rigid by the few Young Farmers Club meetings I attended – that the life of a wood or a year in a field would be so interesting? I admit my original interest was piqued by the fact that he’d written a book with a picture of a hare on the front, but that’s me…

His books are pragmatic but interspersed with poetry by people like Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, both of whom spent a lot of time in the area before the First World War. He delves into local language and folklore and in Woodston he traces the history of the land from the earliest hunter-gatherers onwards.. He’s realistic about what it takes to conserve a wood or a field; he shoots grey squirrels (non-native) to allow native birds to thrive as the squirrels steal whole clutches of eggs. There are no ‘oh no, my sheep broke its legs in a ditch, the vet must work miracles!’ moments – the sheep gets shot too.

There’s no woolly ‘rewilding’ although there is an experimental love of traditional methods which bring back wildlife to the area – not by adding beavers but by farming without pesticides for a year, for example, or by managing woods through coppicing, and allowing sheep, pigs and cows to forage and in doing so fertilise and turn over the land, bringing back insects and the larger animals that feed on them. It reminded me very much of the old lady that swallowed the fly, in fact. There is no anthropomorphization of trees and animals – Tolkien’s Ents don’t come into his equation. Trees are trees are trees. Animals do what animals do, and this is right. I get the feeling that Lewis-Stempel genuinely loves the land and cares for it in much the same way as his ancestors – who also farmed in the area – have done for the past seven centuries. He describes himself as a countryside writer rather than a nature writer as he’s writing about the land and the life it supports.

I’ve been doing a lot of field trails in the last couple of months as I’ve been training for various walks – at least once they dried out a bit – and I’ve found myself more interested in the hedges and edges as a result of this reading. A local site on the north of Epping Forest has been bought by Nattergal to be restored as wildlands, and at some point I’ll get round to visiting and hopefully learning a bit more. I may even try to walk there. I have one of those custom OS maps which is proving very useful indeed – where we live is inconveniently placed on the official maps so putting North Weald at the centre allows me to plot walks in advance so I know roughly where I want to go. Last week I traced a footpath I’d spotted when we were on our way to collect Thing 3.

I’ve also been listening to Tom Cox on Audible. I first encountered Cox via his Twitter account which featured his sad cat, The Bear, and then I found one of his extremely funny books in our local Oxfam. I’ve since read all his cat (and golf and music) books. He began to write about walking and the countryside about ten years ago – still with added cats and his VERY LOUD DAD – but in a psychogeography mode as he wasn’t attempting to farm the land; only to live in it. His 21st Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook are non-fiction, and Help the Witch is sometimes a weird blur of short story and semi-autobiography. He’s graduated into strangely psychedelic novels which I also enjoy, but I do prefer his walking books.

I think my love of reading about nature probably stemmed from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, which were botanically extremely realistic – well, probably not the fairies, but definitely the flowers. These allowed me to identify flowers confidently, if not accurately as my mother insists on saying 40+ years later. This, by the way, is a very useful skill for both teachers and parents, and has even been known to work on my Beloved who is now very suspicious of all my pronouncements.

To be fair – and almost certainly as a result of spending way too much time on trains, the top of buses and roaming the streets of the city – I’m also equally likely to be reading books about the history or psychogeography of London (Iain Sinclair is a favourite). Right now my work reading at lunchtime is Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops, which is as much about the history of Dulwich and wider London as it is about herself. People are interesting, and so are places. The stories of people in places are even better.

Other things making me happy this week

Delivering the last of the sea creatures to the British Library – now making mini jellies and looking forward to making some new stock for summer stalls
A gorgeous swim with the ladies last Sunday
A ten-mile trek exploring a new footpath on Monday
Our first Access Panel on Friday morning
Dinner out with quite a lot of the family on Friday
The library reserves and loans system

This morning I may get out for a walk but GT2 is staying over while his Mama TT2 and Thing 1 are off at a festival. I have not missed being woken up by a small foot in my face, I can tell you. He is a very mobile sleeper, this one, but at least we have a new airbed and I’m not trying to share the sofa with him this time. I may be forced to wake up Thing 2 and hand the little octopus over for the morning…

See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Wood/Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel

Vianne – Joanne Harris

21st Century Yokel/Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)

Between the Stops – Sandi Toksvig

O Caledonia – Elspeth Barker

271: same blog, different river

Well, my feet have just about stopped aching after last Sunday’s Goring Gap half-marathon walk along the Thames, although stairs were definitely not my favourite thing until at least Thursday. I came in 119th out of 124 (and last in my age group!) but since I knocked 22 minutes off my predicted time I am quite happy with that. I quite like a half marathon distance as if you start in the morning you can be done by lunchtime and the rest of the day’s your own. Tan finished in two and a quarter hours, and I was in at three hours and eight minutes. There was some unscientific jogging in the first 5k (because I felt like it!) but mostly it was fast walking.

The weather was perfect for a walk – sunny and warm but not too hot, and the route was mostly flat. The worst bit of climb was the railway bridge at Purley at 10k which went up from the Thames to quite far up a steep slope. The last couple of kilometres weren’t a lot of fun either, on a flint path with a long slow climb. Even the field full of alpacas couldn’t improve it. It was a well-organised event with good signage and friendly volunteers at the two feed stations, and I got to see lots of cygnets, goslings, red kites and friendly hounds.

The cheese and ham sandwich and bag of Frazzles produced by Tan when we got back to her flat was the tastiest food ever!

Later in the week I was back over in Ealing with the rest of the team to catch a bus to Brentford for a tour of the London Museum of Water and Steam. We started with a team picnic in Waterman’s Park, watched by a the usual London throng of optimistic pigeons and overlooking the river where a heron stalked the island shallows, geese shared my crisps and a coot bobbled up and down pecking at weed.

We were taken on a tour of the steam engines which were HUGE and which raised questions about how these would have been oriented in our own little engine house in Clerkenwell. These water pumping engines have several storeys of water below ground, and rise up three storeys too. One of the water tanks has a population of goldfish, and another has a wonderful crop of ferns.

We met the museum cat, Piper, who lives in the office during the day and roams the museum at night keeping the mice down. Mice are inevitable in buildings unpopulated at night – I have never worked in a museum without them – so a cat is an excellent idea. We haven’t quite persuaded our Director yet but we’re working on it….

I was extremely excited to see the tailfeathers of one of the standpipe tower’s peregrine falcons peeking over the edge. The ‘Splashzone’ watery play area is immediately below – naturally we tested it! – and apparently the peregrines have a habit of dropping parakeet heads off the tower into the play area which can be a bit disconcerting for young visitors. You can see me below making the archimedes screw move water up – taken by one of my colleagues.

The museum is fascinating, telling the story of steam and clean water in London, and the sheer monumental size of the engines is awe-inspiring. When they were installed they apparently brought the beams in and then engineered them downwards. They have to be perfectly straight otherwise the pistons will catch on the sides and wear down so the level of precision needed for these huge machines is startling. The engines weren’t ‘in steam’ sadly but they do have steam weekends monthly which I bet are great fun. If you visit between now and October you can also see the beautiful interventions by artist-in-residence Dr Jasmine Pradissitto in the ‘Tender Machines‘ displays.

Other things making me happy this week

On Tuesday I joined Such Stories (aka Laura and Jo) for a family workshop, where we saw some of last year’s play project participants and made some new friends.
Discovering Resident Alien on Netflix (an excellent turn by Alan Tudyk) – very funny indeed.
Seasons 4-6 of Northern Exposure all appearing on Amazon Prime
A surprise parcel at work which turned out to be a Quentin Blake original from Kids in Museums – QB had drawn the ‘Museum of his Dreams’, and they thought we might like it.
The new Joanne Harris novel (a new sequel to Chocolat) appearing on my Kindle.
John Lewis-Stempel’s gorgeous nature writing. I love his books about his Herefordshire home.
Finishing Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. A recommendation from a colleague, this has turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read in years. One of those books that – when you finish it – leaves you sitting there thinking about it. The ones that leave you feeling like Holden Caulfield in the Salinger quote below.

At some point this weekend I’ll go for a walk – I spotted a new footpath when we went up to collect Thing 3, which I looked up on my map and worked out a route back through to Ongar. I need to keep up my speed for Cardiff in October. I’d like to break the three hour mark!

Same time next week, gang. I don’t think I’ve got any river-related activities planned but you never know…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Vianne- Joanne Harris

Demon’s Bluff – Kim Harrison

21st Century Yokel – Tom Cox (Audible)

Cahokia Jazz – Francis Spufford

The Running Hare/The Wood – John Lewis-Stempel