That was the week that was: early April ’14

My mother has been rereading my old letters to her. Letters and cards and what-not, from times I lived abroad. Ones from me. Ones from Dan too.

There are all kinds of funny details in there that you forget, and suddenly you remember in the rereading. Like setting my beginners English class to write letters to my parents.
(Not right at the start of the year, you understand – once they’d got a few words under their belts.)

I seem to remember that my parents wrote back – letters to each of them individually. It was very kind, and a very happy moment for my students, because they weren’t made up letters: they came from real people, out there, ones who spoke English. All. the. time.

I don’t have the letters my parents sent – but I have now reread the letters that my students sent. Some of them thought to say nice things about me, because they knew they were writing to my parents.

Some used ‘a’ and ‘the’, some didn’t. Some put in little details that I had forgotten, like one with Ukrainian heritage. Some of the students’ names, I confess, I had fully forgotten, others not so much. (It is over 15 years ago now.)

So it feels appropriate to put down a few tiny details here, just to help me remember the flavour of life right now. Hopefully it won’t take me 15 years to get round to the rereading.

This week, it’s all about finishing the big end of term project – writing and illustrating a little fact book on a subject of your choice. Junior Reader plumps for MI5 and MI6. (No great surprise.)

So we learn that both are by the River Thames, MI5 is closer to the Houses of Parliament, and MI6’s building is perhaps more interesting to draw. But really, if you judge purely from the other illustrations, it’s all about grappling hooks. (We think.)

A very chilly week, with fog seemingly every day. The flowers are doing their thing, fat buds on the trees like round Christmas lights, unlit, just waiting for the big switch on. We think it may be spring. Soon.

Completing a weekly class for the last time. We are both quite sad. It has been part of the school week routine for probably three years now.

Later in the week, I walk to do a school pickup, and remember Junior Reader and friend, walking up the road to the class, hand in hand.

Walking on the low wall by the church. Sniffing the lavender bush. Pointing out the little fountain outside a guesthouse. The same routine, lovingly remembered and repeated by them both.

I do one of those ‘can I get away without doing a big food shop?’ calculations. Arrive at the nearer shop, find that a certain type of crisps is on offer. It’s clearly confirmation that I guessed right.

Junior Reader is shocked by learning about certain food combinations: hummus and red pepper strips; chocolate and nuts. I am not sure why these are so concerning. (I for my part am concerned about crackers and jam, dipped in soup, which was suggested earlier in the week.)

We have a discussion about door to door marketing, by dint of both Avon AND Betterware lovingly leaving catalogues for us.

We have a spot of card colouring and present preparing (the April birthdays), listening to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an audio book.

We add a few more fascinating facts to our collections. We learn that an octopus has three hearts. That there are more fake flamingoes than real flamingoes in the world. Important stuff.

We travel over to the first of the April birthdays, and share a roast meal. We walk by the river, and do a spot of chumping for wood where a large tree fell into the river and has been hauled out again. The force of the current has stripped the bark from the tree on the thinner branches.

We look at newspapers that my great-grandfather kept, some from 1916 and 17, some from 1932. We don’t know why they were kept, but we are caught up in the wider stories: housemaids wanted, detailed descriptions of the state of the rivers in the local area.

It is small. It is everyday – and once and once only, in that strange way that time offers. We sing along in the car on the way home, and watch lambs practising their steps in the fields.

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