Mental rambles

I’m not sure why but both my youngest children’s school’s hold fund raising events around this time.
Cake sales, Fetes, Raffle tickets and Mufti days.
All good fun but a little over-priced.
I wouldn’t mind but the emotional blackmail is a bit much.
‘Go on buy a homemade cupcake; only a pound…’
:S

My eldest worries constantly about being ‘good enough’ for university.
Her interpretation of ‘good enough’ though is massively different from mine.
Still, after winning merits and distinctions for a great deal of her marks so far, she seems to be doing considerably better that just ‘good enough’.

My son does Taekwondo at school.
He’s been doing it for nearly a year and recently went for his first proper grading…
Yellow belt!
Awesome!

My son’s entire year has been doing a project on the Aztecs this year.
Studying their lifestyle, writing stories, drawing pictures and making models.
The culmination of it all, being an end of term show.
My boy was one of the Spaniards and had a few lines.
My wife though forgot to mention it to me until the afternoon of the show.
‘You have to be home by 5pm’ she told me.
It was already 4pm.
Even if I changed into my cycle gear as quickly as I could…
Even if I peddled like the devil was chasing me…
Even if I was really lucky with the traffic…
I’d never make it before 5.30pm.
I resigned myself to missing it.
Despite that, I still left work at 5pm. If I couldn’t see the show, at least I could welcome him home and listen to his rendition of what’d happened.
I got through the door at 6.30pm and my eldest (who was home for the Easter break) welcomed me in with a cup of tea.
I was grateful but in a bad mood about missing the show.
‘It doesn’t start until 7pm you know’ my eldest told me.
‘WHAT?’ I jumped up from the sofa.
‘The show. It doesn’t start until 7pm’ she repeated.
Why hadn’t my wife said that? I could have made it home for 6pm easily!
What could I do now though?
My wife had taken the car…
I quickly go washed and charged and rummaged though my drawers for my moped keys.
Before putting on my coat, gloves and helmet though, I went to see if it’d start.
(The poor thing is rarely ridden and usually sits alone in the driveway.)
I turned the key…
Vroooom!
I love that little Vespa!
Coat on.
Gloves on.
Helmet on.
A quick hug and kiss for my eldest and off I went.
It’s only a fifteen-minute drive to my boy’s school.
I did it in twelve.
Pulling into the school car park, I left the moped perched on the edge of the sports field and, after pulling off my helmet and gloves, ran for the hall.
It was 6.56pm.
I got to the door to find another father peeking through the small window in the door to the hall.
‘It’s already started’ he said.
‘Can we go in?’ I asked him.
‘Not until there’s a break’ he responded.
Yet another late dad arrived.
‘Am I late?’ he asked.
Suddenly the first song finished and the three of us sensed our opportunity.
None of us made a move.
The other two didn’t want to be the first through the door.
It didn’t bother me.
I gently pushed the door open, made eye contact with the teacher on the other side and smiled as I entered.
The other two dad’s followed in my wake as I ascended the stairway in search of my wife and youngest daughter.
Smiles from them both as I joined them and a beam from my son as he spotted me.
The show was great with a little play and an Aztec version of Gangnam style.
After it was over, my boy ran up to me and I lifted him into my arms and carried him out.
When he realised I’d come by moped, he asked for a ride home on it.
Unfortunately I’d only brought one helmet.

My wife has a defective thyroid gland.
It was diagnosed when she was about twenty.
The prescription drugs she takes, help compensate for this deficiency but her dose is dangerously high.
Dangerously high and have been taken for her for more than half her life.
Her doctor referred her to a specialist who ran several tests on her and specifically, her blood.
They tried lowering the dose to disastrous results.
In the end though, they went back to the maximum dose they dare proscribe.
They had no choice.
The drugs are probably going to permanently damage her heart and shorten her life but without them, my wife would spend the majority of the day sleeping.

Despite having her place up in town, my eldest came home for the Easter break.
Her holiday was ridiculously long and her boyfriend had gone back to his parents’.
Also, after booking her Summer holiday, she was pretty much out of money.
I didn’t mind.
I don’t like her being away.
Even if she’s still in London.

My boy mostly lives in a world in his head.
A world of robots, computer games and Pokemon.
He doesn’t enjoy physical activity and pretty much only eats when coerced into it.
His school though is sports driven.
It’s a good school.
Actually, it’s a great school but its ethos is mostly about winning.
My boy doesn’t care about winning at all.
In a race, he’d happily jog in last with no feelings of shame or embarrassment.
Perversely though, he can be quite good. He’s a natural runner and his hand-eye coordination is way better than mine ever was.
All the boys in his school must do rugby and are banded into different levels of ability.
Contact rugby!
My son was unsurprisingly placed in the lower tiers.
Recently though there was a day when all of the lower teams had to play each other.
My wife went to watch.
Apparently my son, defended well, tackled well, ran well and used not just his head but his body too.
The sports master praised him whenever he scored a try or committed himself to a tackle.
At the end of the game though, he pulled my son aside and asked him why he didn’t always play this way?
My son just shrugged.
Perhaps it was because his mum was watching but more likely, it was because he wasn’t playing with any of the ‘I-must-be-a winner’ boys from the top teams.
The boys who deliberately hurt you on a tackle or shout ‘cheat!’ if they’re losing.
The future leaders of our society.

My ten-year-old daughter goes to a lovely but little school.
She’s really happy there but wishes there were better sports facilities.
They have a small sports hall and a hard netball court but that’s it.
No grassy areas, nowhere to run and no climbing frames.
She’s in year five and as such she was allowed to try out for the school netball team.
Despite having to compete with girls a year older, she was picked as one of the defenders.
She was beaming with pride when she told me.

Some of her teeth are hurting. She suspects it’s due to all the coke she drank in her early teens.
She’s probably right but it does neither of us any good for me to tell her ‘I told you so’.

My mum saw a DVD of an old series of Dr Who and bought it for me.
When I say ‘old’, I mean ‘when I was a kid: old’.
It was ‘Colony in Space’ from the 1970’s and starred ‘my’ doctor: Jon Pertwee.
Age perception is a strange thing. When I watched him as a child, he seemed so old.
Ancient!
Watching again though, from the perspective of a man in his mid-forties, I realised that he was actually only in his fifties.
A very fit man in his fifties!