Yesterday, someone told me I should write a blog…

Oh, I do replied, otherwise, as you see, my head would explode.

My daughter returned from her school trip today. We had a few positives and then the long list of negatives – usually crimes against the personages of children by The Teachers.

Top of the heinous crimes list was hogging the salad cream.

Yesterday I passed an elderly couple in TK Maxx. For once, I was just passing through that emporium of things you never knew you’d really need when you finally found out they even existed. Honest, I really was just passing through – down their escalators is a short cut to the car park. Down amongst the garden furniture and the house furniture and the statuary and the crockery the old lady planted her feet like a racehorse refusing to enter the stalls.

‘I’m not taking one more step until you tell me where you’re going’ she said. She was about eighty at a guess. Her husband looked at least the same. His reply was lost on the wind as I passed through on my short cut to the car park. This was against my better judgement. If I hadn’t have had the non-school trip child in tow I would have definitely hidden behind a giant Moroccan lantern to watch the denouement. For all I know he refused to tell her and they are still there now…

…locked in an elderly married couple’s infinite shopping stand-off.

The other thing my daughter did on her return from the school trip was comment on a clock I have been lent by a student to help my own children finally nail this learning to tell the time on the clock face, instead of reading it off a digital display.

I don’t want you lying in bed staring at your clock on the wall wondering ‘what it all means’ anymore, I said.

Oh I don’t need that thing you’ve got, she said. I can tell some of the times.

She’s ten. ‘Some of the times,’ indeed.

I blame the salad cream hogging teachers…

A thing I never knew I must have