Going awol

I'm going to be disappearing from all my usual haunts (the school run, Aldi, Blogger and Facebook) later in the week and I am not yet sure when I'll be back. After being hit by a few health issues over the last six weeks (yes, that's why we've been acting a bit odd), I'm going in for a big op on Thursday, so I'll let you know how that went once I'm out of the woods. Thomas is going to be demented playing both mum and dad, doing all the school runs while running both halves of our business, and worrying about me at the same time, so please bear with us if things slip a little. See you on the other side. Phyl x

More Titanic homework

So, Amaia's researching the Titanic and spent this evening making tickets for all the different classes. When she looked up the third-class tickets she was more than impressed that you could get to the USA for just a fiver, especially given she has more than a fiver in her piggy bank.

Then she came out with the sweet but daft statement: If only I had a time machine, I'd go back to 1912 with my fiver and buy a ticket for the Titanic. It's such good value!

I can see a wee flaw with that plan!

Titanic homework

Me: What are you doing, Amaia?Amaia: I'm making a model of the Titanic out of a kitchen sponge!Well that's innovative!... silly me! Should I point out those sponges float or would that just be cruel? 😜

Sunflower extravaganza...

        

Over the years, I have grown my fair share of sunflowers in the garden. I usually plant around 30 and end up with about a dozen (thanks to the weather and the slugs). Granted, they don't turn up till about October given the climate, but we get there.

This year we had the hottest and most prolonged summer since we've been in this house. I knew this year I could end up with something rivalling my trips to the South of France or Italy (almost...)

So, I coaxed fifty little seeds till they were about 15cm tall in my greenhouse, and then I planted them all round the garden in June as always. I sat back, camera ready and waited, and waited... 

And believe it or not, this is what Scotland's best summer of the new millennium yielded from those fifty little plants. Seriously? Is that the best you can do?! I give up!

The youth of today

Charlotte was talking about uni this morning on the school run. Maybe I should start calling it the educational establishment run now she's left school but the others haven't... (I have to drop her at Mearns road to catch the No.4 bus to Glasgow uni as First have stopped its coming to Harvie avenue - it's not like anyone needs a bus from half of Newton Mearns that goes to Glasgow uni, is it?! Grrrr)

So, she was saying something about having a lecture in the McIntyre building and I commented that the John Smith bookshop was in there when I was a student so we had never used it for classes.

I then remembered it was where you went for NUS meetings and all our protest marches had set out from there. I then fondly told her of our great protests - the RIP free education marches of '86 and '89 when student grants were scrapped in favour of loans and where we'd carried a coffin from the McIntyre down to town picking up the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Tech and Strathclyde uni students en route before holding a rally in George square and marching out to Queens Park.

I told her about the Mandela protests and our small part in the fight to overthrow the Apartheid regime in South Africa during my student days and our campaign to make Winnie Mandela rector and give Mandela the freedom of the city of Glasgow, then I explained Apartheid to the three wee ones as I drove. Charlotte was listening quite intently, then came out with a comment that blew me away...

'But that was before social media! You did all that and the only people who saw you were doing it were the ones you actually marched past? How did you motivate people to protest if you couldn't get your message out to the wider public?' I explained that it would have made it into the papers or on to the BBC back then and everyone would have known. She found it hard to imagine mainstream media actually reporting anti-establishment news. Her generation assumes that if you protest you need to livestream it on Twitter or Facebook as it won't show up in the newspapers or the TV news. Interesting, if a tad Orwellian.