I’ve just come back from playing ladies-who-lunch with a friend. We do this on our respective birthdays and on odd occasions in between. We meet at the restaurant in the pub next door to my house. They offer a “special senior citizens’ menu”, subtitled “also for those with a smaller appetite”. So we kid ourselves that we come into the latter category and refuse to be pigeon-holed as senior citizens.
We both ordered broccoli and Stilton soup for the first course. The soup turned up. It was red. A red pepper soup. Nice as it looked, it wasn’t what we had ordered. It transpired that red pepper soup was their soup of the day until almost the moment when we ordered the broccoli and Stilton. No! It was the head waitress who told us broccoli and Stilton was today’s soup. Excuses! Excuses! We sent the red soup back and waited for the green soup to arrive. Otherwise the food was as ordered. And all of it delicious.
After lunch my friend was going off to help her son and family move house, or at any rate to pack up ready to move house tomorrow. Starting to pack up this afternoon struck both of us as little tardy, but then we are both organisers and like to advise people on how to do things, ie tell the, what to do! .
My eldest granddaughter appears to have inherited the organiser gene. She and her housemate have some American friends arriving today, not to stay at their house, which is too small to accommodate everyone. They have hired a b&b somewhere nearby. We are currently wondering of they will be able to locate the b&b.
My granddaughter has been tearing her hair out trying to pin everyone down to a programme of activities. Apparently this has been a little like herding cats. Everyone was very lackadaisical. Then odd events started to trickle through:
- the Americans were at the airport when they realised they had left their passports at home. One of their parents had to do an emergency run to the airport with them.
- having arrived at Manchester they realised that a purse had been left behind in the car they had parked at the US airport - a purse containing cash, one driving license, some credit or debit cards. This could cause problems with the car they had arranged to hire here.
- in response to the suggestion that they should alert their bank to the possibility of credit and debit cards being lost, they declared themselves “too stressed” to do so at the moment.
- at Manchester airport they boarded the wrong shuttle bus and had to find their way back to the correct bus to go to the car hire place.
So that is why we wonder if they will ever find the air b&b or if they will drive around Manchester for hours. Presumably they have satnav!
My granddaughter is a mix of stressed and amused, but at least it’s someone else’s stress she really has to deal with. She’ll probably take over when they all get together finally and tell everyone what to do!
In a recent news item Katharine Moana Birbalsingh, self-confessed small-c conservative, described on Wikipedia as a British teacher and education reformer who is the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School, a free school established in 2014 in Wembley Park, London, has said that girls don’t choose Physics as an A-Level subject because they find the Maths too hard! This has led to some splutterings of outrage. Here is a sample of letters to the Guardian newspaper:
“I was incensed by Katharine Birbalsingh’s comments. In 1975, I chose physics, maths, chemistry and biology for A-Levels. The groups were about a third female. Both our physics and chemistry teachers were female. My daughter, now a doctor, chose sciences, including physics, for all her A-level subjects.
I went to a comprehensive school and we were encouraged to do subjects we enjoyed. I am glad we did not have teachers telling us that, because we were female, we would not choose physics or maths because they were too hard. Presumably Birbalsingh also discourages girls from doing too much reading as this might cause their brains to melt and dribble out through their ears.
Ruth Rising
Thornton Watlass, North Yorkshire”
I love the idea of opposition to excessive reading on the grounds that it could cause brain-melt. Of course, there are still parts of the world where such an attitude to girls’ education still holds sway! It needs combatting!
And finally, here’s a little something about sleep. My Fitbit encourages me to get plenty of sleep, giving me a reminder at about 10.30 pm that it’s time to think about bed, and awarding me a star if I get over 8 hours.
This article tells me this:
“Seven hours of sleep each night is the ideal amount in middle to old age, research suggests.
The study of nearly 500,000 adults aged between 38 and 73 found that both too much and too little sleep were linked with worse cognitive performance and mental health, including anxiety and depression. A consistent amount of sleep also appeared to be beneficial.”
There you go. So now I know how they (whoever “they” are) define middle to old age. I also know that this year my ladies-who-lunch friend and I have tipped over into old age! Oh dear!
Update on the Americans - my granddaughter tells me that they are now lost somewhere between Manchester airport and Ashton under Lyne. Oh dear!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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