Life is a wee bit dull at the moment. When I get home these days I find the house uncharacteristically quiet and a haven of academic focus and study. Most disconcerting. For some excitement, I go out to the vegetable garden and count how many more spears of asparagus have popped up. Jimmy is back and plugging away at the final strokes of her university career in the shape of her Arch & Anth dissertation. Irony of ironies she has found she works best at the desk in Bob’s bedroom, away from any distractions at the top of the house. I can’t say it did much for Bob. I remember telling you about a phone conversation I had with Lottie a few years ago when Bob was supposedly all intent and application and in the middle of what was meant to be a solid hours physics GCSE revision:
“Hi Lottie…alright?? I had a thought. I wondered if you could have a chat with Bob and then let me know whether you and he would like to go with Mummy and me to Latitude Festival this summer”
“OK Daddy I will, but oh hang on a minute……….that’s Bob shouting from upstairs. He wants you to know he has just killed a fly with a rubber band.”
Talking of physics, three years on and now it’s Lottie cramming before GCSE’s start next month. She tucks herself away for hours on end, but emerged from her particular work-station the other day just before we sat down to supper with a towering stack of note cards on each of which was an equation covering all the various principles of physics and asked me to test her. As you imagine this was not a task that I would have entered into for any of my other baby darlings with any great relish. But sensing there was a chance I could be pleasantly surprised I gritted my teeth, mixed the cards up and off we set. Frictional force, Kirchoff’s Laws, Torque, Translational motion, Current and Resistance. I lost count how many different equations there were, but she rattled them off one after another without missing a beat. 100%. How about that eh?!
But it’s best not to allow oneself to bask in glory for very long is it? We sat down to dinner ( quinoa salad for goodness sake ) and for some extraordinary reason Jimmy asked me to test their general knowledge. We didn’t get far. “How long is the equator” was the first question I asked. I don’t think I’m telling stories out of school, but I was faced with three completely blank faces. Neither Sophie, Jimmy or Lottie had a clue. When finally forced to make a wild guess Lottie, the genius child, came up with 8,000,000 miles.
She could tell how appalled I was, so, I suppose in an attempt to make me feel happier with my lot, Sophie quickly related a story from her book-club earlier in the weekend about the daughter of one of the members who, appearing on some TV quiz show and asked what Hg represented in the periodic table had replied “Haagen-Daz”. Later in the same programme, searching valiantly for the name of the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral she came up with “Christopher Robin”. “Oh” she’d apparently said in her defence “I knew it was some sort of bird.”
PS Tell me, no Googling and no calculator…just a bit of mental gymnastics, how long do YOU think it would take a snail to crawl round the world? (Our world…not Lottie’s.)
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