I had a blood test at 11.50 today, booked on Friday. At least, i think it was 11.50, it may have been 12.10 but we erred on the side of caution and left at 11.35 for our doctors which is 10 minutes up the Parkway from here, on a good day. The Parkways in Pboro are a set of dual carriageways that form a sort of drunken diamond around the city, making it, technically, easy to get quickly to any extremity of a very oddly shaped city. The down side of the Parkways is that whenever there are short term roadworks in one bit of it, the City Council seem to be compelled to dig up the exact same stretch of road on the other side too, sometimes also the town centre too, so that there is no escape from the traffic at all and no rat-run. You just have to sit in it.

Had a swerve to avoid an accident on the edge of a sliproad that is on a corner and so narrowly avoided going into the back of a traffic jam, 800 yrds from some roadworks that are new this morning (and unannounced) that are charmingly placed 2 miles along from the set they’ve nearly finished that have been creating 6 miles of tailback for the last 8 months. Even better, the traffic jam started just after the last junction prior to the one we wanted so we were trapped in it, no escape.

I got Fran to ring the docs to tell them we were stuck and as she couldn’t negotiate on my behalf, said i’d come in anyway and either have the test late if there was time, or rearrange. I couldn’t turn round, so i figured i might as well do that. We sat in it for a hour; it literally took 60 minutes to do 6 miles, 50 of those were covering 800 yards and when we got to the slip road, it was obvious they had shut the entire parkway with an extremely overworked diversion trying to happen around a roundabout. *Snort*

I got to the docs, walked in and it was the sourest of the receptionists on duty; the others are nice but she REALLY lives up to the stereotype. I came in and said “sorry, blah, blah, roadworks, blah, blah… am i too late to be fitted in?” She didn’t even look at me, just said “Yes Meredith, you are too late” (I had to resist the urge to immediately say “MRS RAYMOND ACTUALLY!!” she got my back up so much.) |I tried, as i normally do, just to be friendly and communicative, i certainly wasn’t expecting to get seen and i didn’t cause any fuss, i just thought that while i was booking again that perhaps i could have a passingly friendly human chat. But no, no eye contact, no “urgh that sounds awful ,what was causing it?” There was no one else in the queue at all, no one i was holding up and she wasn’t even finding me a new appointment, she was pretty much just blanking me. Eventually i got a new appointment, by which time i was fuming, slammed out of the surgery and phoned from the carpark to make a complaint about her startling lack of common courtesy. The office manager just said “Well, i’m sorry, she is like that, but we can’t do anything about it, it is just the way she is.”

I dunno, i know we have to be careful these days and not sack people for reasons they might sue for, but if you can’t communicate, can’t put people at their ease, can’t be polite, friendly, helpful or even just professional – is a surgery reception really the place for you? I’d have been disgusted to have been treated like that by a bored 16 year old at a supermarket checkout but at least i’d think they had a point. I’d be ashamed of myself if i was so rude. The manager seemed to be suggesting she had real issues with it, and heaven knows i’m not unfamiliar with people who struggle to communicate and i’m far from brilliant at small talk myself but if you can’t even be civil, even if (i don’t know, i’m surmising) you were say moderately autistic, should you really be doing that job?

I was so angry and upset by her attitude that i was shaking and nearly in tears by the time i got to the car park, she treated me like a i was a naughty schoolchild who should know better than to be late for class; it really offended me. Which is annoying, as i was relatively sanguine about missing the blood test and the hour in the car.

Then we drove home and went the other way round town where we discovered, true to form, that they’ve closed the other side of the parkways too. And in an hour, i’ve got to go out again. Grrrr.

I love horses. They are loving animals and there are lots of different breeds. My favourite breed is called the Thoroughbred. It’s my favourite breed because it’s the fastest horse and it’s very pretty. When they are fully grown they are usually 16.1 hands high (explain this to the group). They are usually brown, bay, or chestnut. Ponies are like horses but smaller. My favourite breeds of pony are the Dartmoor pony, Exmoor pony and New Forest pony. Dartmoor ponies when fully grown are 12.2 hands high. They are usually black, bay, or brown with some markings. Exmoor ponies when fully grown are 11.2 to12.3 hands high, usually bay. They are even rarer than the Giant Panda and they have very big eyes. New forest pony’s grow up to 12.2 to 14.2 hands high, they are any colour except piebald or skewbald.

Horses are measured in “hands” which is the width of a man’s hand, or about four inches. 4 inches is the same as 10cms. They are measured from the withers (which means their shoulders) down to the ground. Any horse of 14.2 hands or less is a pony.

There are lots of different colours of horse and some of them are a bit confusing! Bay is a reddish brown horse with some gold in it, so the horse looks like the colours of a chestnut. A bay horse usually has a black mane, tail and lower legs. Piebald’s are white and black in patches and looks a bit like a Frisian cow!!!! Skewbald horses are the same as Piebald but the black parts can be any colour except black. There are Spotted horses in white, black or brown; they look a bit like Dalmatian dogs. One of the strangest colours of horse is “grey” where the horse is actually white!

A very unusual horse is the Albino; it has snowy white hair, mane and tail as there is no colour pigment in them and they have pink eyes. There eyes are really clear but you can see the colour of their blood being reflected in them. You can have Albinos of any type of animal, even people and i have seen an Albino rabbit.

Horse have different types of markings on their face. They can have a snip, which is a bright white stripe on their top lip or they can have a blaze, which is a thick white stip all the way down their face. They can also have a star, which is a mark of any shape or size on their forehead. On their legs, horses can be described as having socks, stockings or various other markings.

Horses are used in all sorts of ways; they can be wild, like ponies on Dartmoor, they can be pets, they can be ridden in competitions or used for hunting. Working horses might work on a farm, especially in olden times when they were used for ploughing; they are usually big, strong horses and a Shire Horse can be 18 hands tall, so just the height up to their shoulders is as tall as my mummy!!!! I’ve been reading a book called War Horse and in the book the horse goes off to be ridden in the First World War battles.

I don’t have a horse but i have 2 aunties who have horses and i’ve been to see them and ride on them. My dream horse would be a Thoroughbred which is black with a star on her face. I would call her Twilight.

Button is my rabbit. She is 6 years old. She is a dwarf lop. She is the oldest of our 4 rabbits and i love her lots. I love to stroke her and some times she sits on my lap and i stroke her while she relaxes. Sometimes we let them out in the garden and she always runs into the foxgloves. Then we have to shoo her out of them because she might eat them and they are poisonous to rabbits and to children. Foxgloves are poisonous to everybody!

Button has a boy friend called Smartie and they live together in the same hutch and run. He is 4 years old and he is a bit stroppy. Smartie is a Mini Lop; Smartie has an enemy in our rabbit group and his name is Fiver. Fiver is only 1 year old. He and Smartie are enemies because they are both boys and boy rabbits don’t like living too close together. So they don’t fight we have to keep them in separate runs but Smartie still stares crossly at him sometimes. Fiver has a girl friend called Clover who lives with him so he doesn’t get lonely.

Clover is our newest rabbit and she is 5 months old. We got her for Amelie’s birthday because Fiver needed a friend to live with. She is the same colour as Fiver, which is dark brown but she is bigger than Fiver and she is a lop, so she has floppy down ears. Fiver is a Netherland Dwarf and has short, pointy ears. He is the smallest type of rabbit and much smaller than Button. Button is a foot long and very fluffy, which is why i like to stroke her. She is white and dark brown and she has a circle of brown on her nose, which is why she is called Button. It looks like she has a chocolate button on her nose!

Every day, we have to feed them their pellets and sometimes straw and hay. We also have to give them fresh water. In the summer, they all drink lots of water. We give them carrot treats and dandelion leaves. We also feed them handfuls of long grass and dock leaves and sometimes carrots we can’t use for cooking. We sometimes put them in a run on the grass but they try to dig their way out and make daddy cross!!!! Once Button escaped and tried to dig a hole out of the garden, under the fence but she stayed sitting in her hutch afterwards. Smartie tried to dig a a tunnel under the house; he isn’t very clever!

The other thing we have to do, is clean them out – it really stinks but apart from that job, i love having rabbits. Rabbits are lovely, i love rabbits. I love rabbits that are big and small!!!!

Fran’s book study of War Horse (for which i have finally managed to find a performance at a time we can do with 2 seats left together!) has led us to an impromptu exploration of the First World War and onwards through European history in the 20th century in conversational, scrape the surface, style. I quite like doing it this way and i’m lucky that i’ve got a good enough working knowledge of the ins and outs of it, that we can talk through how politics shaped Europe in the 20thC without having to use books or get too bogged down. I don’t suppose i’m any different there to anyone else – but i’ll bless my education for it because i felt confident enough in what i was saying for us all to get plenty out of how we covered the information without starting wall charts, projects and losing the impetus that got us there in the first place. I’ve never really recovered from the “Tudors” – i always feel that everything needs to be a massive project to be anything, but really it is not true.

We started with the (frankly, i feel, rather inadequate) information in the SOTW4 on the first half a few days ago and carried on yesterday using the BBC Schools WW1 pages and an Usborne book as a starting point. We discussed Edith Cavell (something of a local hero, we have a car park named after her in Pboro!) and firing squads, people being shot for cowardice and the idea of posthumous pardons, the Lusitania and propaganda and a variety of other things. We’ve not, in fact, gone into much detail about the war yet and to some extent i can see why my GCSE course focused on the reasons for the war rather than the war itself; unless you are very into military stuff and weapons, there is less to get your teeth into in some respects, unlike the WW2 where you can really look at The Home Front and Germany etc. However, i think we’ll be looking more at some poetry, the trenches and probably the Suffrage Movement on the back of this.

The conversation yesterday was prompted then by Fran asking me (which i thought was fairly perseptive for a 10 year old!) why Europe doesn’t go to war with itself any more. My brain deserted me on what the UN’s first incarnation was called…. (still has actually…. errrr… aha… League of Nations) so we discussed that and the idea behind it and how we still have something similar now. We talked about communication being important, how alliances alter and refine, times when that has broken down and times when it has really worked. We discussed the pressures put on Germany by the end of WW1 and how that led to WW2, we talked briefly through WW2 including the persecution of the Jews and then on to the Cold War.

Incidentally, Doctor Who played a good part in this particular conversation, after the references to Labour Camps in last weeks episode. It was great to have a human angle on not only the euphemistic use of the phrase (and who doesn’t drive passed the signs to “Immigration Reception Centre” on the M11 without a shiver?) but also on how that would remind and horrify people of a certain generation. We thought about the differences between blatant propaganda and “spin” and discussed the differences between the Concentration Camps in Germany and the Internment Camps here.

By this time the younger children had drifted in too and were listening, while leaning against me, the door frame and chairs… it felt very natural and they were all engrossed. We moved on to the division of Germany after WW2, of the beginning of the Cold War, travelling from West to East, the division of Berlin and the differences in what was available on each side. This has been backed up further today by reading about the birth of Communist Russia. We discussed the travels my dad made into Eastern Europe (regularly, as a sports journalist, they were very good at Basketball!) and the things and stories he would bring back. We talked about friends who tried to get help with marriages in the West, or who were known to have (lost the word again.. not eloped, what is it?) over the border and the penalties for families who were left behind.

We had a good giggle over the idea of a “Cold War” across 2 halves of a bedroom, where Fran and Maddy might each have a bag of flour to hurl as a deterrent if the other crossed the half way line and how, knowing i’d make them clear it up, neither would want to be the one to throw it or provoke it. We discussed Nuclear bombs and the extent to which the felt a real threat in our lives back then.
Again, we drifted on and talked at length about the summer when the Berlin Wall came down and how mindboggling that was. We tried to imagine how it felt to have something taken away that had always been there and how much we had to change our mindset, even as Western Europeans, to get used to the Iron Curtain no longer existing. We thought up loads of scenarios to try and imagine changing it, of which the best was perhaps Fran, likening it to how her mouth is now different and how she couldn’t imagine changing it, how odd it felt and how it is now so normal to her. We talked about my family trip to Czechoslovakia and the 6 year old spitting in the road at a Russian soldier and how the man we stayed with simply wouldn’t acknowledge that there was an airfield behind his house.

Today we’ve used SOTW4 to conclude the war (the Americans arrived, everything was okay, hurrah!!!!!) and looked at the Romanov family, discussed conspiracy theories (again!) and talked about women gaining the vote and how the UKs modern political system worked.

We’ve also done Meleto, music, EC, maths, reading etc and at the weekend Max did the first section from one of our new resource books on Astronomy; he rates them highly. The little 3 are now playing and Fran is learning to draw horses.
Overall, i feel it hasn’t been a bad start to the week!

Loving the ingenuity…. obviously, if you didn’t watch Doctor Who this week, this will mean nothing!