Foreign Perspectives

The summer turned out to be surprisingly busy, albeit mostly not with the holiday things that we were expecting to fill it with.

At the off was my summer school in the first week of July. The write-up for that took an awful lot longer than expected which in turn knocked a number of things back. I finally managed to get that off last week which means that right now I’m in the midst of doing .the assignment for the main biology course, a week late, and then it’ll be straight on to the final assignment for that course.

The little guys decided against the football camp in the end, although more by default than anything else in that we couldn’t track down the contact details of the one that they liked last year and they weren’t that fired up about the alternative that we had available.

We’d expected that once we got Mum in to the residential home that the work involved with that would reduce. Well, the direct running around looking for a place has gone down alright but the amount of admin associated with it has gone up somewhat. The social services people seem to be of the view that we are working on that full-time and expect responses to their demands no later than the end of the week which, in almost all cases, has proved to be an impossibility. Quite how they expect some things to be done when the people I need to contact are on holiday is beyond me.

The headmaster, Mr Hutchinson, of the school died after an accident in his home over the summer which has made the start to the school year somewhat subdued as he was always racing around the playground. Racing around everywhere in fact as he never seemed to sit down. You’re probably thinking that it meant that he had no time for anyone but actually he always found a few minutes to chat with any child, parent or teacher who came up to him; I’ll miss our little chats. The school kicked off with two half-days so this is the first full-day that the kids are in with both of them coming out at the same time rather than having John finishing an hour earlier than James this year which is much handier.

Wendy was busy with assignments during the summer and is getting going on the final assignment for the current course which is just as well as the materials for the next one arrived yesterday. It’s a medical history course and there looks to be an awful lot of reading to be done over the year.