Out walking yesterday we came upon bags of apples on a garden wall, with a notice: “Baking apples. Please take.” So we took. The same thing happened last year, but I am pretty sure it was a little later in the year. What a nice gesture, a bit of community generosity. The owner of the apple tree could have just let them rot when he had used all he wanted but instead shared them with the passers-by.
Now I really do need to go and pick those wild blackberries I have been talking about collecting for days now.
According to the weathermen there is a cold front, a former tornado apparently, out in the North Atlantic, heading our way and bringing rain tomorrow and for the next few days. Of course, that may not affect us as the national weather reports and forecasts often appear to be much more biased to the south of England. We shall see. But just in case the forecast rain does come along and turn the ripe blackberries into blackberry mush I need to head out with a container and collect some. And I have a couple of good recipes for combinations of blackberry and apple.
Granddaughter Number One has quails in a pen in her garden. They produce copious amounts of eggs, some of which she and her housemate eat, some she feeds to her dog (!?) and some she gives to various friends and family members. We have suggested that she should actually sell them but it seems you need a license of some kind to do that. It crossed my mind that she could follow the example of the person with surplus apples but then I had visions of local youths having fun throwing quail eggs at each other and at passing cars. If she lived near the apple-donor she might get away with it but her neighbourhood has rather more rascally teenagers roaming the streets. So it goes
My friend Colin wrote yesterday in his blog about the reported average cost of returning to school in Galicia: €338 per pupil, which I agree with him is rather high. But we have to remember that in Spain parents have to pay for their children’s school books, which is not the case in England. But coincidentally I came across this article about the cost of school uniforms here.
And here is a letter someone wrote to the Guardian in response to that article:
“Your report on parents skipping meals to cover uniform costs struck a familiar chord In my 20 years of working in the third sector, I helped run school uniform reuse schemes that made a real difference to struggling families.
But too often these efforts were undermined by schools themselves. Minor tweaks to logos, ties or blazers – introduced every year or two – meant perfectly good clothing could no longer be reused. It is a practice that benefits suppliers, not children, and it leaves parents paying the price.
If uniforms are meant to level the playing field, schools must stop treating them as branding exercises. Consistency, not constant change, is what families need.
Antony David Davies”
Also coincidentally we talked about school uniform over the dinner table while my Spanish sister and my son and his family were visiting. My son’s 11 year-old daughter is about to start her secondary school,scareer at their local grammar school and they have a list of items they need to buy. My sister and I reminisced about our bottle-green uniform (including regulation bottle green knickers!) at the girls’ grammar school we attended. We even had regulation outdoor and indoor shoes, with a specified style of shoe. But that was back in the 1960s.
When my children were small, in the 1980s, their primary school did not have a uniform but gradually over the years a school sweatshirt, with logo, was introduced and his morphed into the kind of uniform we used to wear. This has been the case for all the primary schools around here but children are not expected to wear a tie, as we were.
My primary-schoolteacher daughter tells me that as regards footwear her headteacher has acceded to the request for children to be allowed wear trainers - provided they are plain black, thus avoiding the competition over who has the most modern trainers.
In Spain it is still mostly the norm that private school pupils wear a smart uniform while state school pupils do not. However, my sister tells me that there are parents who argue that it would be easier to have a uniform and avoid the argument over what to wear each morning. This is an argument ai have heard many times here. However, the Germans still seem to avoid uniforms for schoolchildren. A german friend told me that they had had enough of uniforms in the past!
I suspect hat his discussion will rumble on for ever.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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