Hey Blog! This week’s post is about the best bookshop in the universe!*

Scarthin Books is one of my favourite places on the planet. It looks, from the outside, like your standard private village bookstore; but once you step inside it changes to a seemingly endless extradimensional portal to the bookiverse the most fantastic bookshop ever. It may not be put at number one on the world bookshop rankings, but for me, it is. Seriously it is fantastic. With an amazing café, rooms upon rooms upon rooms of books, three floors, outdoor seating, and a bookcase that is in fact a door (something like to the secret panels I’ve dreamed of); this is the epitome of all bookshops. And it’s just two stops on the train away!

We decided to go to there on my birthday, just a few days ago, which is what gave me the idea for writing this. I feel the pull of bookshops like magnets, it seems; probably stemming from the days when we had no fixed abode as it was once put on a prescription and had to stop off at various bookshops to buy presents for various relatives. I used to then start reading a book and read it until I was dragged away, then when we went to the next bookshop, I would find the same place in the same book and continue reading. This, is of course not the cause nor the result of the French for bookshop – librarie – but is an interesting point to note. Ah, I love etymology!

I did get a birthday cake this year (morse code decoration) but I also had a slice of Scarthin café’s excellent cake. And one of their fantastic caramel lattes. I also bought two books, both brilliant. One was The Grey King from the Dark is Rising Sequence; you may remember I reviewed one in that series a while ago. This one is about Will, last of the Old Ones, and Bran, the Pendragon, finding the golden Harp of the Light and waking the Sleepers. The other book was The Light Hunters, which is from a new author I’ve never tried before. It’s always exiting to try a new book, as you never know when a brilliant author could appear of which I later purchase several series for my collection. That post is currently held only by Enid Blyton, so I’m on the look out for more! I spend a lot of time looking around bookshops and reading most of the way through a book before buying it – which some may say defeats the point – and Scarthin Books is very good for this in having a LOT of very good books. I am glad to have it so near!

HEIAS Bookshop Rating /100:    99/100. That’s good!

*Subjective…

Hey Blog! This week I realised I’ve never told you what exactly I do in the Environmental Management IGCSE I’m doing – so I’m telling you about it now!

I am now 14 in less than a week (last post at 13!) and am having to consider my options for later in life. I have absolutely no idea what to do with that wonderful time, so at the moment I’m just concentrating on having fun. However, I am doing my first exams/qualifications now (as seen in my last post) and am doing my first GCSE in Environmental Management, with Jake at Humanatees, my humanities tutor. I am rather partial to the environment and know quite a bit about it and how it works. This is useful. I seem to be rather good at it, to my surprise; even to the extent that my work is used as an example for the others (ok, so that only happened once).

The topics range through nine modules: rocks, energy, agriculture, water, oceans, disasters, air, human population, and ecosystem management. We have just reached the eighth – human population – and so are nearly finished :’(. The class is a whole other matter; it is on zoom, hilarious, hectic, and utterly brilliant. Some participants use the chat almost constantly – I find this rather hard as my brain cannot focus on two things at once; some say nothing (or else they do it on private chat); and some, like me, type something in sporadically, except when we’re answering a question and then I like to put a bunch of long answers in at the same time. I do at least listen to Jake and answer the questions (albeit sometimes my answers are too long!) and write down a few notes. The notebook we bought for EM is certainly not full yet, but it has a good way to go.

We have a WhatsApp chat for EM too, it is less full than the zoom chat but is still fun. I have got to know at least one of the other students very well online and am looking forward to the Not Prom which Jake runs every year for GCSE students to meet the others in person. It seriously is the funniest class, as Jake does some of the funniest analogies known to man – from earthquakes as old men’s wrinkly bottoms shaking, to the greenhouse effect as David Bowie putting blankets on you while sleeping; and all that while telling us with perfect accuracy how these phenomena occur. Then there’s the homework, once a fortnight, which could be anything from using the information in a doggerel poem about making a potion to create a table on ocean resources, or copying a diagram of how sewage is cleaned. Yet it’s serious too; as we are learning – well, most of us at any rate. I have got A*s each mock – which is always a surprise (oh dear, I hope I haven’t jinxed it now!) and am looking forward to getting a sparkling exam grade – not that the letter matters, it is more down to the enjoyment and how much I’ve learnt. And those are both a lot!

The exam is in May and June (two papers, a week apart). By then, I will have finished the course, and be an absolute whiz at Managing the Environment. However, Jake does more than just this course, and so I think I may be going on to do some more of his stuff in the future. Wish me luck!

Hey Blog! I’ve just had the results of an exam back and in this post I’ll go through what I did to get it!

I play the piano, as seen in Focus on Music (5^th Nov. 2021) and This is music to my ears! (15^th July 2022), but I have never done a piano exam. The only other exam like it I’ve done is a drama exam, and that was part of a group and so long ago that I will probably forget sometime. We have always abstained from piano exams, instead focusing on the playing and improvement to be happy and confident, but last year we decided to do one. I did the ABRSM Grade 4 Piano Performance Exam (which I will never forget due to the sheer number of times I had to recite a monologue of who I was and what I was doing at the start of every video), which was made popular via pandemic and is where you take a video of yourself doing four pieces as a performance. Just to note – I never intend to do this type again – it requires a lot of hassle and preparation!

“The four pieces I am playing for you today are Allegro in F, by Handel, A3 in the syllabus; La nouvelle poupeé, by Tchaikovsky, B3 in the syllabus; Ticklin’ Toes, by Price, that’s C3 in the syllabus; and my own chosen piece is In the Hall of the Mountain King, by Grieg.” That is stuck in my head for eternity now, as it is the pretext to all of the 40-50-something videos that we took. Some were a lot better than others. I, although told by my teacher I have a great playing ability, have an incredibly bad ear (not literally, I mean I can’t tell where I went wrong sometimes) which is why Mum had to stand behind the camera not only to turn it on and off in time but also to say when the video wasn’t worth recording anymore. Seeing as it was a video exam, we had infinite tries, and this makes you think that it needs to be perfect. However, it got to the unbearable point and we finally settled for one I did over Christmas where I started off in my Santa Hat. Because I was having fun with this one, it was inevitably better than all the others! The amount of things we needed to do in preparation to take the video aside from piano practice is ridiculous, as you need to check the washing machine won’t beep, none of the phones will ring, the neighbour’s power sander and saw will not interrupt, and all that before setting the camera up on the stand and aligning it so it gets my feet and hands in shot but not the top of the bookcase! This is not made any easier by the fact that I have to sit still at the piano during the setting up process and as Mum has an incredibly good ear, me playing is sometimes very distracting. Don’t worry Mum, I still love you xx. By the time we’ve finished that, we find that the frame while in video mode is smaller than when not taking the video, and we have to do it all over again!

However, you must be mad with suspense by now as I have not actually told you what I got. Clue – if I was ashamed of it, I probably wouldn’t have written a blog post about it. I got 24/30 in one piece, and the others 25/30, in addition to the Performance category where I also got 25/30. Those quick at arithmetic will know I got 124/150 – a Merit. This is Higher than a Pass (100-120/150) but less than a Distinction (130-150/150) – all in all a nice, solid mark. If they had given me just one more mark for that 24/30 piece I would have had a round 25/30 for all of them, but I’m happy with what I got. However, I have changed my views on these exams – I do not intend to do a video one like this again. I have found myself with some time to kill at stations and a café once or twice over the period of my exam, and have even had a round of applause from all the people in the café, convincing me that I prefer to play live. In-person playing (like in-person piano lessons) is much better than over the internet. Some day you may see me at a café on the piano in the corner, and while I can play a few pieces at any time from memory, I can play a lot more with some sheet music!

As for the future, I may do a Grade 5 and may progress from that, but for now, I’m happy with a Grade 4 and intend to continue playing the piano!

Hey Blog! I’ve just done the Expedition Challenge Award, and in this post, I’ll tell you all about it!

As Pooh famously said, “It’s got an X in it,” and I say, all expeditions are fun – well, I hope they are anyway. Some can be done in a day, getting from your town to the next and taking the train back; but some take a few weeks, having to lug your luggage to the North Pole and back (or, as Christopher Robin said, the East and West Poles!). However, the one I just did was in between the two – a one-nighter, with a rather long walk on both days either side.

The top badge you can get in Scouts is the Chief Scout’s Gold Award, which is my longstanding ambition for Scouts. To gain this badge, you need to complete the nine challenge awards: Adventure, Outdoors, Skills, World, Personal, Creative, Teamwork, Team Leader, and Expedition. The last of these is almost equivalent to a Bronze DofE, in that you have to go on your own (the leaders still spy on you with their binoculars!) you have to almost break your back by carrying carry a very heavy pack containing everything you need for two days, and you do all the planning and preparation. Most of the space in my new 65l rucksack was a sleeping bag that I did use and clothes that I didn’t use. I always take too many clothes on a camp – but then, Be Prepared, eh?!

Till almost the last minute there were a couple of large issues with the camp – number one, that I hadn’t had any practice with the gas stove (I had seen them and used them, but I’d never done it all myself), and number two, the weight of the pack. There were a few other concerns – like the fact that they set us a route card to do yet I hadn’t ever seen one before and the planning for Sunday lunch changed a few times; but we pulled through. There were four of us going, in two tents, carrying two gas stoves, eating four meals total, traveling 14km Saturday and 9km Sunday.

We started at Shottle, across the Derwent, at 9:30 Saturday morning, and took the footpaths down through the fields to Duffield, or, to put it in the words of the Scout who had written the route card, “till there are lots of roads that turn right”! We often had to give our grid reference over the radio (I’m superb with maps, generally, so I was almost always the one giving it, except when I made the others do it for practice). Here, we crossed the river and the railway, met with the leaders who had been stalking us, and then began the steep climb up the hills towards our destination. We arrived at Drum Hill campsite 2 hours ahead of schedule at 3:00 Saturday afternoon (but then, the schedule had been done for ½ hour per kilometre, which is rather slow!).

I have told you about camping at Drum Hill before, in Home Ed on a Camp (25^th September 2022), but I haven’t told you about the site itself – partly as we rarely see much of it in daylight. There are two fields at the top plus a trig point in one, two tracks leading to the base of the site, several cabins, several toilet blocks, many firepits, and dozens of taps dotted around in stone pillars. We were on pitch 8 of the Cub field, which is a nice spot. As opposed to all times I have been there before, we did not come in from the top where the “drum”, the reservoir, is, but from the bottom – a path with a nasty gradient if carrying backbreaking packs! Once we had pitched our minute tents, we hung about for a couple of hours till it was time for dinner (pasta & passata sauce – how Scout camp can you get?!). That done, and pudding had (Bakewell slices, thick custard, and anything else we had brought), we watched the space station fly over and retired to our tents. In my case, I deliberately tried to go to sleep so as not to be up till midnight with their silly tales – we did have a long walk in the morning, after all.

The night wasn’t too bad, we all woke up more than once but that is normal on a camp. The trouble is not the waking up but the getting back to sleep afterwards. In the morning, we got up and made breakfast (porridge) and at 9:30 Sunday morning set off. I had done the second day’s route card, with what I hoped were more accurate timings and very small, if clear, instructions. It was not so long as the first day, but feet were still aching by the time we got into Belper and reached the Scout Hut at 2:30 in the afternoon. As, in the lockdowns, we had walked many miles (though not carrying packs), I knew quite a lot of the route, which we did without too much difficulty.

It was, on the whole, a most enjoyable experience. To all you who intend to do something similar, I suggest blackmailing/bargaining with your parents to make them do the washing and unpacking when you get home – when you have just got in after a hike like that, you do not want to keep working! Hopefully you won’t be told you have to take a bigger role in housework after doing everything for yourself for two days… Either way, this is one of the last things I will be doing with Scouts – I am probably leaving for Explorers sometime soon. So I made the most of it!

Hey Blog! It’s time again for the next book review – and this one is a very good book!

The Dangerous Book for Boys is a great book. It has tons of information, tales, instructions and paragraphs on various subjects; for instance, how to build a tree house, or the different types of fossils; tales of how battles were won or how to tie a good knot. Generally awesome. It’s a bit difficult to describe, as it doesn’t follow one premise or topic; it extends far beyond that and goes to dozens of topics and ideas – “the perfect book for every boy from eight to eighty”, it claims to be, and I think it does the job. It has so much stuff – that is part of its beauty – it details so many different things that you can look through it for almost everything. It is a generic reference book for all boys who are looking for an answer. If you want to recall an interesting fact about the correct definitions of an indefinite article, or who the king of England was in such-and-such a year, just open the book and it will probably be in there. Codes, Shakespeare quotes, star maps, how to play anything between poker and cricket – this book has it all.

It seriously gives you almost everything. I have found it a help many times, for all sorts of questions, and sometimes continue to do so. But this is not the end of it – there were a few things the authors missed. So the Double Dangerous Book for Boys came into being, with everything that they had thought of in the meantime. What more can I say? It’s equal in the highest standard, and both share an honoured place on my shelf.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a traditional HEIAS book review with out the customary sentence – if you want to truly understand how good it is, READ THE BOOK!!! And the Double! All I can hope is that the Deca-dangerous Book for Boys comes out in a few years. I will be reading it!

And as for my female readers (as I’m sure c.50% are), I believe there is a similar book – but I’m not a girl, I don’t have the book, and therefore can’t review it. Maybe start your own blog?!

Hey Blog! Last Monday, I went up to Sheffield for a new class all about science!

In Mad about Science! (23^rd Nov. 23) I told you I rather like science. I also told you I did a few online classes with Amanda from Sparking Stem. However, I have never done an in-person science class – but that all changed on Monday when I did one!

Like the event last week, we had to get up very early… Then drive to Belper, get on the one train a day that runs direct to Sheffield and walk from the train station to the bus stop, wait for the bus, take the bus to the place where I was doing the class, and hang around for an hour. Luckily, there was a coffee shop nearby – all hail the great British coffee shops! What could we do without you?! Next, I entered the building and waited for the class to start.

The class was about testing for nutrients in foods, specifically proteins, lipids, sugars, and starch. These are tested for in different ways, using Biuret solution, Ethanol, Benedict’s solution and Iodine, respectively. Biuret solution is naturally blue, but if protein is present it turns purple when stirred. Ethanol is naturally clear, but in the presence of lipids it turns white when some water is added and the lot is shaken. Benedict’s solution is naturally blue of the same shade of Biuret, but creates a brick red precipitate when left in a 60°C water bath with the test sample containing reducing sugars. Iodine is naturally red-orange, but goes black if starch is present when applied to the sample. Using these four chemicals, some of which were a fire risk and all of which could kill you if swallowed too much (even a little could get you in hospital), you could determine exactly the molecules present in a sample of food. So that is what we did.

The first task was to find out what four unknown liquids contained: A, B, C, and D. Solution A came back positive for the lipid test, B came back positive for the sugar test, C came back positive for the protein test and D came back positive for the starch test. Well, that worked – quite straightforward if you think of it like that; the biggest difficulty was setting everything up and checking what to do with which reagent (the posh term for what you drop on something to tell you what it contains – like a rock dropped on someone’s foot is a reagent to see if they have a voice box – you can guess why!!!). However, once we had got the hang of that, we progressed to real food.

Here, I can best demonstrate with a photo. These are my results for the four tests – you can clearly see some of the colour changes that show molecular content. I can also show you the conclusions I drew as to the content of the samples (sorry for all the technical terms!):

I have two more sessions to do in-person, very soon, so I may write about those as well. I hope to do more in future, as it would be nice to do more of these excellent practicals!

Hey Blog! This week I’m writing about going somewhere that I will be going to again in May and is part of a new chapter of my home ed.

Regular readers will know I am currently studying for an Environmental Management GCSE, which is to take place this May. Because I am home educated, as I discussed in my post on what home education is like (How I home ed, 2^nd April 2023), we have to find our own way to sit and finance exams, and this is massively helped by an organisation called Tutors and Exams, who provide a connection for home educating families between examiners, tutors, and students. They now have ten exam centres across the UK – and last Tuesday was the opening day for one of these!

When we first looked at booking me an exam, we thought the nearest centre would be Doncaster – which for a multitude of reasons isn’t ideal. However, we recently heard there was to be a centre opening in Birmingham, which suits us better as there are more trains to get there! We also decided to go and have a look around so when we went for real, I would know what it was like. Therefore, we popped off to Birmingham to have a look around.

Having-to-be-got-up-at-6:30 and two train journeys later, we arrived at Birmingham New St. There are more entrances than are useful and no compasses visible at the station, so it took us several wrong turns and half an hour of looking at the map for considerable periods and going the wrong way before we got on track to arrive at the new exam centre. We were just a hundred metres down the street from it when we saw a coffee shop – something we had wanted to find and of which there was a slight lack in the area! It turned out that Tutors and Exams struck a deal with the shop to have a small discount for people coming to the centre while we were in the shop – so we were the first customers to get it! After a very nice coffee and pastries that came included (something I’ve never seen before!), we got in to the new centre. It seems very nice. There is a small set of rooms downstairs, where we waited to go up to the exam rooms, two upper floors of rooms full of clocks, desks exactly a certain distance apart – because the exam rules are ridiculously precise – and posters listing the specific things you can’t bring into the room. As I have never been into an exam room before, I didn’t know what to expect so I was not delighted or disappointed, but as Mum used to be a teacher herself, she did – and apparently these rooms were lighter and airier than typical exam rooms. This is good – I am glad that these are better because when it does come to GCSEs I will be in a place that I am happy in.

After we had seen the rooms, there was a talk about the organisation and the new centre, which apparently answered all of Mum’s questions, and the opening ceremony. I even got onto the Facebook page as a photo of me was used in the video of the opening. This photo was much better than the one we had to send off when we booked the exam – that one makes me look like a convict! Either way, it was a nice day out and I plan to be back there, sitting (and obviously passing) the exam, sometime in May.

Hey Blog! In December, I had a chance to have a go at a craft I have been LONGING to do, and finally was able to!

Over the years, I have built up my arsenal of making skills. I can now:

• Paint, draw & otherwise create art
• Sew, both machine and hand
• Knit (& purl)
• Do pyrography on wood
• Whittle wood
• Turn wood
• Knap flint
• Forge iron

That last is the one I want talk to you about today, as it is the most recent acquirement. And I’ve always wanted to do it!

The High Peak Junction is the oldest railway workshop in the world. It is rather amazing, being both a museum and having a working forge in the corner. Some days where you could make a poker were being offered, so, hearing about this and recognising it would be brilliant for me, Mum booked a place. This was for one back in September, but due to urgent circumstances we had to rebook. There were new places available in December, and so we decided Dad would get the day off to come and watch me, and I could do a forge day in winter. Snow would have made it perfect, but you can’t have everything…

The forge was going hot when we got there, and everything was ready. Making the poker was actually very simple. You get the rough iron bar hot, to make the metal malleable, put the hot metal on the cold anvil and hit it with cold hammers. When I say “hot”, I mean the metal was glowing yellow-orange at the start, then faded through orange to red to black. Even when it looked black, it was still 300°C, so hot enough to melt your skin – no risk at all, then! It’s surprising how easily you can bend and shape the metal when it’s hot! All in, it was a 20-30 minute procedure, all the three parts of forging. The point is the first thing you do.

Get the tip hot. Pump the bellows. Then angle your blows on it so it becomes a point. Pump the bellows. When this is done to your satisfaction, place the middle of it in the fire. Pump the bellows. Take it out of the fire, and put it in a vice, then using tongs twist the metal so you get a twisty shaft. Return it to the fire, with the other end in the heart of the flames, and pump the bellows (alternatively, if you want to save your arms, get a young and energetic/bodybuilding/long-suffering parent assistant to pump the bellows while you do the exiting and dangerous stuff). Taking the poker out the fire, put an attachment in the anvil to bend a round loop in the end. Hammer with the poker both above and below the attachment to create a loop, then bend it back to centralise the loop. Get the whole thing to a lower heat, rub with a wire brush to remove oxidised scales from the metal, then quench it in water to harden. If wearing glasses, expect not to see for a minute! Remove poker from water and admire your handywork.

That’s about how I did it. We also had conversations on the difference between quenching in water and in oil, how scales appear on the surface of the metal and other topics. My one is rather simple, there were examples that were beautifully done with complex metalwork, but I’m rather proud of it if I say so myself, and I’d like to have another go any time. There are more extensive days offered for metalworking there, but we have not signed me up for these yet as I don’t know how old you have to be. I can only hope that I can continue to work with many materials for a long time.

Hey Blog!

Happy New Year! It’s the end of 2023, the beginning of 2024, and 2 and a half years since I began Home Ed in a Shed. In this time, the blog has come a long way. The reasons for setting this blog up originally were to keep a diary of my home-ed adventures, and to tell others about what I do. That last means I couldn’t have done this without you, so thank you!

Answers to the quiz from last post (if you haven’t done it yet, you should check it out).

1.       Will Stanton, sign-seeker and last of the Old Ones

2.       Pizza

3.       The Kit Bailey © Certified Willow Stick Square Lashing Hammer ™

4.       The dark-suited man in The Card Players, by Cezanne

5.       About 15

6.       My own trowel

7.       A glowing orb in the bottom of a lake

8.       6 – it’s the only working 6-sailed windmill in the country

9.       2

10.   Amber Valley Vineyard

11.   Cotton

12.   Only 6 were ever made

13.   Poacher’s noose

14.   “Physics is only maths with toys”

15.   93

How many did you get right?! Have a happy 2024!

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Hey Blog! It seems to be Christmas Quiz Year – I’ve done five so far: one with the family, one with the Scout Group, one at a friend’s Christmas party, and two with my Humanatees tutor, Jake. Here is my view of the quizzes – and a few facts.

Quiz No. 1 – the Bailey Family Christmas Quiz. Each contestant choses a topic and writes ten questions (in my case, the last few during the interval to get crisps and snowball cocktails), and then run the quiz. It’s very fun. Previous rounds have included Christmas Carrols, Christmas landscapes, and Christmas traditions. This year we had rounds on Cars, Christmas babies, and Christmas literature. My round this year was on Christmas Trees – including questions on how many Christmas trees are sold by the British Christmas Tree Growers’ Association (8-10 million); the type of wood used to light a yule log (a piece of last year’s log!); and why young ladies had to be careful passing under decorations at yule (they might get kissed randomly if someone caught them under mistletoe)!

Quiz No. 2 – Party Quiz. This was at a friend’s Christmas party. It had been adapted from a 100-question quiz to a 50-question quiz, and was quite tricky. There was a parents’ team, a children’s team, and an 18-year-olds team, of which I, of course, was in the children’s team. It was a little like a game of Chinese whispers, as we had to pass answers along to the person writing the answers – two games in one! The evening was most entertaining.

Quiz No. 3 – Scouts Quiz. All scouts tried to answer various questions, such as cryptic clue for a sweet, “Capture reward” – that, of course, meant Bounty. Or where did the quote “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal” come from? (Home Alone).

Quiz No. 4 – Solstice Quiz. This was my Humanatees tutor’s annual quiz on topics of the year, featuring Geography, a higher-or-lower statistics round; History, a before-or-after dates round; Marine Science, the fish-or-not-fish picture round; the Bumble Rap, where he dressed up in a bee costume and buzzed to a background track – and we had to guess what he was buzzing; and finally Mythology, featuring a troll-or-turkey picture round. It is always hilarious (especially the Bumble Rap!).

Quiz No. 5 – EM Quiz. Also run by the same person as the last quiz, there were two parts to this one: a Christmas songs quiz and an EM quiz. I did not win either of these. I came fifth in one, and didn’t even make it to the podium on the other. Apparently I’m not that good at recognising songs.

And now, a quiz for you! On what I’ve done this year. (Answers in the next post).

1.       What is the name of the protagonist in the first book I reviewed this year?

2.       What was the theme of my murder mystery birthday party?

3.       Which device to hammer sunflower seeds did I create for a birdfeeder making day?

4.       Who was I in the drama sketch, and who painted the painting I was in?

5.       How many skips did I manage to get while skimming stones on Orkney?

6.       Which digging tool of my own did I bring, but didn’t use, at an archaeological dig?

7.       What glowing object did I have to touch to teleport home in my first D&D game?

8.       I worked on one of the sails at our local windmill, but how many sails has the windmill got?

9.       How many levels of Bikeability have I completed?

10.   What is the name of the vineyard I helped with the harvest at?

11.   The seed pods of what plant links two posts in October?

12.   How many alethiometers exist in Lyra’s world?

13.   Which knot did I intend to use to prank trick or treaters?

14.   Mum’s old maths teacher said what in referral to physics?

15.   What is the Home Ed in a Shed café rating for local restaurant Bridge House?

Answers coming in the next post! See you then.