Bonding

The reason I haven’t written any new posts for a few weeks is not because I haven’t done anything to write about, but because of the gym thing –  something had to give. I was hoping it was going to be the housework but alas it appears to have been my creativity.

I've been busy, I've done loads I could have written about but no witty words have sprung to mind. I have swam lengths hoping for inspiration, I have pounded the treadmill and even my usual strolls along the river have failed to produce any literary greats. So I gave it a break.

Time is moving on and it is nearly a whole year since our return from the US. Do I miss that Californian sun?Just a tad.

The teenager has commenced her study leave for AS levels and I realise she is coming to the end of her first year of UK education.   She is learning to drive – yet again – and apparently managing well with the complications of a clutch and a stick shift, and tiny, winding narrow roads.  Teaching the teenager to drive in the US was a great mother and daughter bonding moment - but I'm not sure it would work that well over here. I've decided to let a professional driving instructor have that pleasure instead. 

Taking the teenager to the stage show of the Full Monty was a fun evening out and also good for bonding.  The bar tills malfunctioned in the interval and we had to gulp our glasses of wine down very quickly before returning to our seats but I think that only added to the overall experience. We also went shopping and to my great delight, now that the teenager is a working girl with money of her own, she actually  turned her back on the Jack Wills sweatpants with a comment of ‘I can buy those for half the price in H&M’. Exactly what I had been telling her for years.

We've decided we could also bond over the new Great Gatsby movie - it is one of my all time favourite books along with Tender is the Night. The teenager loves them both too, but will we be disappointed? Robert Redford will always be my Gatsby and I'm not so sure about Leonardo Dicaprico (who incidentally comes ahead of Leonardo di Vinci when I googled his name to correct the spelling - a sad sign of these shallow Hollywood times we live in.)

The arrival of the university prospectuses has also provided more bonding.  I hadn't realised that booking appointments for Open Days was such a competitive process - we have apparently left it 'quite late' and lots of  advertised talks and tours are already full. How can people be so organised?  I am starting to feel like an inadequate parent and need to get my super-school-mom uniform back on.  I need to FOCUS.  At the end of June we now have two early morning 6.00 am car journey starts to be on schedule for the only available slots  at 9.00 am.  Not something to look forward to. Perhaps I do need to fast track her driving lessons in the hope that if she passes her test before then she could always just go by herself......

The Week That Was

One of the hardest things about blogging is trying to find something exciting to write about in a rather dull week. It’s the art of making the ordinary seem extra-ordinary.

A relatively quiet uneventful week really, the highlight of which was teenager’s first UK school report in three years.  When we left the UK back in 2009 we were warned by teachers at her local comprehensive that we would be doing our daughter’s educational prospects irrecoverable harm by moving to the US.  Fortunately this does not appear to be the case – her school report was positively glowing and she has coped with the transition from her small US high school to mega college style sixth form very well , with a work ethic and academic standard that appears to exceed many of her comprehensive school contemporaries.  I’m not saying the US system was perfect, far from it, but in our particular case I can’t help but think far from being detrimental to the teenager’s education it will prove a positive asset. (This may well say a lot more about her previous comprehensive school than the marvels of a private catholic high school education.)

A second highlight was another pub quiz team win, a nail biting evening with victory clinched by a single point.  Low lights included the dismal weather, a rather poor attempt at Christmas shopping, a trip to the dentist to have my very expensive US crown admired and prodded and eventually filed down, and an overheating cooker – which quite naturally failed to perform the same trick for the domestic appliance engineer when he came to examine it. 

The Christmas shopping is now on hold; a present ordered on line to save a trip to the shops arrived in pieces and had to be returned – to the shop, defeating the whole object. The cat has been cooped up in the house because of the weather and has perfected the art of jumping all over the furniture and chasing scrunched up pieces of paper  around the house – my rather desperate attempts at keeping him occupied. Almost barricaded into the house by a wall of leaves outside the front door I finally lured the cat out in a rare moment of watery sunshine and we did a bit of gardening.

All in all  a rather depressing week, which ended on another low - an over-indulgent Friday night trip to the pub resulting in a very groggy subdued weekend. Another Saturday night eating cheese on toast, drinking a cup of tea, and watching the X-Factor – how to make that sound interesting?

An evening spent with a delicious plateful of heart warming welsh rarebit,  accompanied by sips of refreshingly leafy Earl Grey, whilst watching a pointless exploitive exercise in media manipulation.  

At the least the creative writing course is coming on well.