the adlards

YES!
NO!
YES!
NO!
YES!
NO!
Y-N-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-O-E-S …

Aah, the morning chorus! Don’t you find the local wildlife relaxing?

I reproduce these here with some trepidation – they’re not mine but they accurately mirror my still-forming view. They’re here because I get asked what I think (and ocassionally I like to).

“The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”

“It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”

“Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.”

These and more about John Holt on Wikipedia.

I heard today that one of my friends has died, girls. I’m feeling sad.
Who was he, Daddy?
His name was Aidan.
What happened to him, Daddy?
He had an accident, my girl, and died.
But how did he die, Dad?
I don’t know, love.
Is he a man who works with you?
Yes, he worked with me in England.
Is he still in England?
No my girl, he moved to South Africa around the time we did.
Does he live near us, Dad?
No, darling, he lived in Jo’burg.
Where is he now, Daddy?
I think he’s in heaven, my darling.

Dad, it’s a good thing I’ve got a spare thumb. One that I suck and one spare in case my sucking-thumb hand gets hurt.

The girls love Duplo. Did I say love? I meant adore. They build castles and houses and boats and cars and trains and keep themselves busy for hours. A castle might create a week of imaginative play – if MGW and I don’t destroy it at night to ensure more construction play tomorrow.

So, as you might imagine, we’re on the look-out for Duplo deals. Since pink Duplo has pretty much vanished (why did they discontinue the castle series?) we keep an eye on the second-hand market too. About the middle of last week Michelle picked up an add in the local online listings for Lego (R500/box, choose your own bits) and a bag of Duplo. We duly called and made an appointment to visit.

We went on our Duplo hunt by way of the midwife’s offices for a regular check-up. It was my first with this little piglet and all’s well. We then wound our way to the Duplo house, which we had both imagined as a shop/closing down sale of some kind (probably due to the volumes of Lego ostensibly in play).

We pulled up outside a cheap block of flats and looked at each other, this didn’t look good. There’s no.way kids were being raised with Lego in there. We had an appointment, though, and like to feel we’re of a certain class so headed bravely in. There were no numbers on the units, so we just sort of floated about looking vaguely quizzical until the guy popped his head around a corner and said “Hi”.

I think he may have been taken aback by his heavily pregnant visitor, because he asked us to hang on while he got the stuff for us to look at. A couple of minutes later he seemed to have changed his mind because he invited us in. It was immediately apparent that we weren’t going to be buying anything. Entering the dingy entrance hall it was clear that he and his mate had used the couple of minutes to drag hard on a couple of cigarettes to try to disguise the thick clouds of dope smoke in the flat. They were wasting their time and we were walking down a dark corridor in a stranger’s house to a drug-lair-cross-dubious-goods-emporium.

I had never seen a real-life sitting room that was so obviously full of articles that had, um, fallen off the back of a lorry. MGW, to her credit, made a show of looking carefully through the barrel-bag of odd bits of Duplo, some of which looked as though they’d spent the best part of their life buried.

Me, I was yelling “SWIM DOWN, NEMO, SWIM DOWN” and “RUN.AWAY” by turns.

“Well, I don’t think that’s worth the money you’re asking,” says my wife.
“Oh, OK, bye then,” says the bloke and we’re out the door and off.

We think we’ll buy new. Pink’s overrated as a colour anyway.

There was the biggest hermit crab I have ever seen at the touch pool. Far more like Sebastian-the-crab than the little hermits I remember scurrying around rockpools in the days of my distant yoof. When the girls were done feeling the different seaweeds and playing with anemones and shells they wanted to see the crab better. The attendant reached gingerly into the water to clear space around it; it scuttled just a little and he shrieked. Like.a.girl.
Maybe he was just clearing his throat.
It sounded like a shriek to me.
Josie laughed.

I have a boy’s room for the first time in a long time.
Not a little-boys’-room, you understand, a real boy’s room. It has my PC, my games, my books, my airfix models (yes), my toolbox (yes again) …

I spent the day sorting the room out and the evening, after little-girls-bed-time, sitting in my boy’s room building a PC from old bits I have. It has one of those keyboards that plugs into a big round multi-pin socket. No really. I’d forgotten those ever existed. It’s also got a bunch of drives and a whopping 64Mb of RAM. Now that’s not something you’d get hold of easily today. I’ve installed a version of Redhat from Back In The Day and will use it to archive stuff.

Way cool man.

Unemployment is all it’s cracked up to be.

Sophie woke at 4.15 and sat up in bed with a huge grin on her face refusing to go back to sleep. We moved her to our room and she eventually dropped off. When Jo woke she sang “Happy Birthday” to Sophie in bed before she realised Soph wasn’t in the room; she came dashing through to give her a hug.

Sophie’s bike, above, has become permanently attached to her left hand except when she’s playing with her tea set.

Tea at Granny & Grandpa coming up and toddler group in the afternoon.

I was sorting through old papers in my study the other day and came across Adlard & Adlard: The Complete Summer Catalogue. “Boats and paints and pots and pans and lamps and stands and mugs and rugs and towels trowels flower-pots and chairs and shoes and tins and bins …”. When we moved to the UK in 2000 we sold pretty much everything. We took three chests of stuff and an easel in excess baggage. We moved back to Cape Town in 2006 with a 20ft container and over the past four weeks we have very seriously considered doing it all again.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that there’s “very seriously considered” and then there’s “very seriously considered”. As my blogging has become more and more sporadic over the past twenty months and our relationship has inevitably become more distant as a result, there may be a chance you’ve forgotten my natural inclination to understatement. On Tuesday afternoon at 16.20 we decided not to return to England next week. Our house was on the rental market; we had flights booked and confirmed; we had forty minutes of business time left before the packers arrived to start work in our house. It just didn’t feel right.

So quite seriously considered, then. We had decided in the last week of April that it was time to change our employment arrangements. Our gut feel was that we’d be moving back abroad, but we went out to our networks and friends all over the world immediately. Sure enough, we had not a single local lead within our decision timeframe and so made our plans to move: budgets were drawn up, sales lists were (once again) compiled, removal quotes and surveys (and re-surveys to absolutely ensure we’d fit a 20ft container again) were had, tickets were booked, agents of every description were contacted, met and negotiated with. There were periods of immense frustration, times of great excitement and times of intolerable grinding drudgery. Yes, I know, it was just four weeks.

There’s a lot can be accomplished in four weeks, but the real art of critical program management is about the skin in the game. We had backed out every financial commitment (except our dining room table, which we’d shipped up the coast and are missing terribly) by 10am on Wednesday. The emotional turmoil of change is more difficult to quantify, impossible to “back out” and evades easy resolution.

For the past few days, then, we’ve been regrouping, recovering from the inevitable early-winter viruses and beginning to think about what we want next. A change of pace of some description no doubt; a set of changes of pace following hard on each others heels in some almost-random pattern would probably be best.

We’re not quite sure what that looks like yet but have a little time to figure it out, what with work finishing this week.

When I’m at my most stressed I dream of going farming (deluded soul that I am). If anyone out there’s looking for a goat-herd please let me know.
Must include house with grounds.

This post from December 05 was brought to my attention by a spammer who evaded my nets. It made me laugh not just for MGW’s impressive witticism, but because life feels pretty dangerous right now and I’m spending a fair part of my time cleaning:

I need to find something dangerous to do.
What do you mean?
As we grow up we stop doing things that involve physical risk and I think I need it.
Vacuuming can be very dangerous you know.