Salut mon Blog/Hey Blog! Picking up where I left off on my last post… (Note: photos coming soon)

When we were planning to go to Paris, I wanted to see some of the famous landmarks: the Eiffel Tower being the most famous of course, but I also wanted to go to the Arc de Triomphe, l’Obelisk, and the Louvre. We saw the Louvre on the first morning, but didn’t go in, however we passed outside and saw the pyramids. When we next go to Paris, we will have to go in for a visit. From the Louvre, we walked through the Gardens Tuileries and at the other end is the Obelisk. Here I got my first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe, which is at the other end of the avenue. The Paris Obelisk is originally from Egypt, is it and has a gold cone on the top. It is right at the spot where Louis XVI and Maris Antoinette were guillotined during the French Revolution, one of the revolutions that swept across the world in the 1700s and inspired Les Miserables which I have to go and see at the West End sometime.

We visited the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe the next day. The Arc de Triomphe is a LOT bigger than Marble Arch at Hyde Park corner (as I discovered on the way home), and it also has a flame burning underneath it which hasn’t gone out for a really long time, a flame over the grave of the unknown soldier – no one knows his name: he represents all the thousands who lie somewhere on the battlefields of the First World War, and subsequent conflicts. The Eiffel Tower now has a hoarding around the outside so that they can check everyone’s bags on the way in to make sure you aren’t some terrorist planning to blow it up; luckily weren’t carrying anything the authorities were interested in and were able to go and stand underneath it, which I didn’t think we could at first. Apparently there’s some work going on, it’s being painted for something like the vingtième time (or twentieth for English speakers) – but as it’s been standing there for over a hundred years, so there is a valid reason!

I like Paris. Apart from being a very famous city, it’s interesting, and has a lot of good cafés to sit outside, drink coffee, eat pastry, and soak up the atmosphere. The food is definitely very, very good, as it’s probably the pastry capital of the entire world, with pâtisseries from the classic croissant and pain-au-chocolate to ultra-fine delicacies standing in the window that look, to use the phrase that I don’t understand, too perfect to eat – though in my mind, they look perfect enough to eat! Baguettes, the traditional French stick of white bread that goes brilliantly with French cheese, tastes even better in France, for some reason! There’s also crepes, AKA pancakes, which give rise to the age-old classic joke “this is crepe” (not a positive statement!) and which taste AMAZING, very nice coffee/hot chocolate, and every meal comes with a basket of pain (said pan with a shortened “n”, meaning bread) to go with each meal, which I think is a lovely tradition. It’s also useful for mopping up the plate and as a starter! The dinners are very expensive in Paris, though, and the breakfasts are tasty, but very small! They’re called petit déjeuner for a reason, but I would call them très petit petit déjeuner!

A quick note on language – watch out for the different tenses of verbs when speaking to different people. I find referring to singular straightforward, but plurals are far harder to remember! Top Tips from Home-Ed-In-A-Shed – when talking to another person, especially as a tourist, always use the plural/polite form (Vous instead of Tu). It’s a sign of respect in France, and as we don’t do in in England, it’s always wise to speak in this form to local yocals.

Next post is about the exhibitions I visited, so stay tuned for more updates about my stay in Paris!

Salut mon Blog! Oh, sorry, Hey Blog! You might have noticed from the language, but WE’VE BEEN TO FRANCE!

This was the first time I have been out of the British Isles since 2017, when we popped back to Barbados to see how it was getting along after we had left it in 2015. So it was kind of a big deal. As we want to lower carbon emissions as much as possible, nous ne prenons pas l’avion, mais le Eurostar (or ‘we didn’t take the plane but the Eurostar’ in English). The main reason for going to Paris was to visit two prehistoric art exhibitions, both at le Musée de l’homme and that for a short period overlapped. I am doing an Arts Award, an award for young people interested in the Arts, on the subject of Prehistoric Art, and the level I’m doing (Silver) is equivalent standard to a GCSE in Arts. For the award you need to visit an exhibition/show, and as there are two on the topic of prehistoric art there, it made for a nice excuse to go to France and have fun! I hope to tell you about these in another post.

This is also the first time I have been to France, or indeed any country in Europe outside the UK, since I was about 1 and we went to Sicily. I don’t remember this of course, and as I wasn’t speaking at the time, I’ve never had to use another language before, as all the countries I’ve been to have been English-speaking. English is spoken a lot more in France than I thought it would be, but my conversation is still not up to the standard I would feel comfortable going to another county on my own with! Luckily, I’m learning French on Duo Lingo and have done a bit with Mum, so I was able to understand a few bits of conversation and order myself a caramel crepe at a creperie completely on my own. I’m glad Mum was there though; as she used to teach French before I was born, she could check into the hotel and ask all sorts of questions where me and Dad would have been utterly lost!

The Eurostar leaves from London St. Pancras International. It’s not the most interesting experience going through the actual channel, as there’s nothing to see! It’s dark out there, as is expected when you are underneath the sea floor, and from start to finish it’s 50 kilometres, starting in Kent and finishing on the north coast of France, or the other way round if going the other way! The Channel Tunnel is the third longest railway tunnel in the world, and has the longest undersea section. We were traveling at 270-something mph for a lot of the journey, which meant it didn’t take long. The longest part was traveling to Paris after arriving in France, though the entire journey seemed to take a lot less time on the way back for some reason! The train’s destination in France was the Gare du Nord, meaning train station of the north, from which it was only a twenty-minute walk to the hotel.

When we arrived in France, my first impressions of Paris were that it was big, it was busy, it was fancy – pretty much as I’d expected, really. It also had a different smell to England; Paris smells of warmth and a bit sweet (maybe that’s all the pastries). It’s a normal western city, and it is more like London that I’d expected. I also heard more different languages bring spoken in Paris than I had heard in London earlier the same day. Paris is a gateway to lots of places: eastern, western, northern and southern Europe, not to mention the British Isles, and so has developed a fusion of many different cultures. I also heard my first swifts of the year; this signals a return from spring to summer and further brightened up the evening.

Hey Blog! Last Saturday I had a drama performance, which I mentioned in my last post. In this one, I’ll tell you what happened with it!

This is probably my third big drama performance, and was the first for which I wrote the script. Or rather, I should say, we, my drama group, wrote the script, as it was a bit of practiced lines and a bit of complete improvisation. We had been planning it in drama for a few months, but the bulk of fully forming it was done in the last three weeks. Our drama teacher had had the idea of a ‘gallery ghosts’ performance, where various paintings from different time periods came to life, and so we all picked the paintings we would come from. Eventually, the final set were: Lady with Ermine (DaVinci); Girl with a Pearl Earring (Vermeer); Self Portrait (Van Gogh – for more on this artist see my previous post An Art Experience); The Card Players (Cezanne); Lady with Hat (Matisse); American Gothic (Grant Wood): and Son of Man (Magritte). These seven paintings were portrayed by nine performers, of which I was the dark-suited man in The Card Players.

If you look up the paintings, you will see what we had to try to copy, which is not all that easy! I think we managed all right, however. The props were possible to sort out, but the costumes less so – unless you have a massive wardrobe containing everything from polystyrene apples to Elizabethan costumes in the middle of the building where you practise. Luckily, our drama teacher has just that, so costumes weren’t a trouble. We had planned two performances outside, for the Belper Arts Trail, an annual event showcasing art and local talent. We had rehearsed a lot, and as it wasn’t my first performance, I found it not too difficult. As I was one of the card players, I was looking at my cards, not at the audience, so I wasn’t unnerved by the growing number of people watching until it was time to actually do the performance, which decreased trepidation.

The one thing I had to provide myself for the costume was the pipe. I said, perhaps foolishly, that I would whittle one. This took up most of Saturday afternoon, though I hadn’t started it till Friday. It looks absolutely amazing though, so if you happened to be looking out of your window in Belper on Sunday morning and saw a tall man (my Dad) and a boy in a black suit, old-fashioned hat, and white cravat waving in the wind with an odd-looking pipe sticking out of his mouth – yep, it was me! We wandered around town for a bit, and then went into the building for a last practice.

Both times we performed were brilliant, as the play we did was funny and poignant, because there were funny lines like “knock yourself out” to Van Gogh, when he asked for something to eat and there was a bottle of wine on the table; and the best in all time with this group – “God won’t pay my mortgage” in response to the American missionaries saying where God had got the man with the apple. The Lady with the Ermine got annoyed because everyone was more interested in “this beastly creature” (the ermine) than herself! Because we were all from different times, everyone had different ideas, and therefore some people had more in common than others! The end was Van Gogh slowly starting to die, as no one offered him any food. The missionaries did notice him, but had nothing themselves. The last words were from Van Gogh – “Please, preserve my paintings!” which was an amazing cue to all freeze, being preserved in time. The whole performance was super, and I would like a chance to write a script for something like that again!

Hey Blog! This post is exploring two big events happening/just happened in the UK right now – St George’s Day and the upcoming coronation of His Majesty THE KING; which are up in the streets simultaneously in flags, bunting and other forms of plastic tat!

St George’s Day is a national holiday and commemorates the patron saint of England. He is also the patron saint of quite a few other countries, including one named after him – Georgia. There are multiple legends surrounding him, but the main one is of him slaying an evil dragon who was terrorising a local village. He also managed to rescue the damsel in distress, saving her from the dragon who wanted to eat her. Noticeably, the red-gold dragon Smaug, from The Hobbit, made a practice of stealing maidens and eating them when he had destroyed Dale and taken the Lonely Mountain (see my book review on The Hobbit for more on this amazing book); and Perseus, rider of Pegasus, the winged horse, rescued the princess Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus, perhaps inspiring the later tale of the popular saint.

In Scouts, we celebrate the day with a service in the district church and then a march through Belper, the town in which our Scout HQ is. I have attended the full march for only two years as it is only for Scouts, but it is one of the two special occasions in the year, the other being Remembrance Day, which is also attended by Cubs and Beavers, so I have been going to that longer. The band goes at the front, and the entire district of Scouts and Guides comes after. The line of people gets even longer as at the other church we pick up all the Brownies, Rainbows, Cubs and Beavers, and even Squirrels (four-year-olds in Scouting). These last caused some confusion, as I said “look out for the Squirrels,” and people thought I meant the animals! The march takes about three-quarters of an hour, and ends with an enormous crowd of people all packed together on one street. You get to see all the parents running along backwards trying to take pictures, which is very amusing. Mine don’t do that, which makes it a bit easier.

The service before was also very funny, as the person running it used to be a criminal investigator and had worked with the police on crime cases, so he got us to tell each other what we had for breakfast that morning (one of the kids in our troop shouted “pancakes” – we had had them that morning at Scout camp) and the other to be totally uninterested, then the other way round and the other to be as interested as possible. Then, we had to try to identify where something was hidden in a picture, and it proved to be very difficult. For example, count how many faces there are in a tree – there were eight, but finding them was incredibly hard. Then there was one where there were two people getting up close in a rose – the picture was small and I couldn’t have got it until it was shown! It seems the art of looking is a tricky thing…

The Scout Camp mentioned in the previous paragraph was a two-night Scout Camp, and was the plan for April to get another month done for my Dragon Award (see Bed in a Shed for more info). We did climbing (I and two other Scouts went down upside down, which I would have done twice, but we had no time left); whittling tent pegs (mine defiantly looked the best, but most of them were also functional); fire lighting, and archery, which I didn’t get to do as I had to be taken out to go to drama for an hour as I had a performance coming – the next blog post! I have done archery before, so it wasn’t too bad, and anyway, the camp was already fun! On Sunday morning the shop was opened, so I went and bought a Drum Hill woggle, and a site badge for my blanket. On the way back, we found what could possibly be a bullet blank, but couldn’t be sure. Sunday was a bit hectic, as we had to be picked up from camp in the morning, go home, get clean and get changed, and then go out to parade – all in a few hours!

Coming to the King, well, you can see in almost all shops that they are ready, with piles of flags, bunting, ribbons and much more, so we should have a very memorable coronation, and as it is the first for 70 years, it will be very important to a lot of people. The patriotic feeling in the country is high, and seeing as we have a different type of monarchy with a different place in the world than ever before, I think it will be very interesting to watch how it all unfolds!

Hey Blog! Book review time again.

The book I am reviewing today I have possessed since I was four, and was living in Barbados (the most eastern island in the Caribbean) which is a little lump of coral not much more than a million years old. However, I went through the phase almost every child goes through growing up, and that is to be supremely interested in dinosaurs. I heard a couple of small people in a park yesterday playing a game where there was a lab and dinosaur fossils – not certain, but I expect the game was that one of the fossils had woken up! I was convinced that there had been dinosaurs on Barbados, even though the last mass extinction that killed them off was around 64 million years before the isle’s head poked above the waves, so I tried digging in the garden. I didn’t find much of interest, but I’m sure it gave me a lasting hobby and interest in dinos, and my interest in palaeontology (the study of prehistory) would eventually lead me to archaeology (the study of human history). Anyway, my big brother gave me a book for my birthday, I think it was, and this book is still with me, even though the spine has fallen off and there’s not much more than a few bits of webbing holding the front cover on! However, I take that to be a sign the book has been extensively loved.

Dinosaurs: a children’s encyclopedia is the first thick book I ever got. I still can’t know all of it, as the facts it contains span from the beginning of life, to the evolution of humans. It also discusses evolution, the construction of eukaryotes (multicellular organisms, yes, you are a eukaryote!) continental drift, the atmosphere and climate, relative size, the formation of fossils, and all that before even reaching the creature information! This information is presented in fact file format, with basic information such as when the creature lived, where it was found, what habitat it lived in, and how big it was. Then the paragraph or two of information says extra notes, and any other information from prehistory or when it had been discovered.

The book covers weird creatures from the dawn of life on earth, such as Hallucigenia, the thing with either spines or fleshy tentacles for legs, and the other for back decoration; and things like Echinoderms, the group of animals that include starfish, meaning the family that began in the Cambrian Explosion (when living things went through a huge boom in life, causing millions of fossils to appear) is still around today. It details insects, gastropods, giant dragonflies, ammonites, and all that before getting to the vertebrates. In here, the book tells of fish, such as the megatooth shark (probably the most terrifying predator of all time – it had jaws five times the size of a great white!) amphibians and reptiles, and then, in the next section, dinosaurs. All the common names, such as T Rex, Diplodocus, Velociraptor, Compsognathus, Stegosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus, and many more, as well as the less well-known ones, are in here; though seeing as we don’t yet know all species alive on Earth right now, and the dinosaurs existed for about 180 million years, it’s impossible to know all the species that existed in that time. We usually find only the bigger ones, as anything small is less easy to see, and less likely to have been preserved.

I used to have a special relationship with one of the species above – yes, I am referring to Dippy, the Diplodocus at London’s Natural History Museum (relationship not that I was engaged to a dinosaur, but I was friends with it). We had telephone calls across the Atlantic, and he once came over for a visit – I spent about a month piling up leaves in a corner of the garden ready for his visit! I don’t know how he got there; he must have either inspired the story of the Loch Ness Monster but in the middle of the ocean, or flown over on a few Quetzalocoatluses, Quetzalocoatlus being the largest known pterosaur. The former of these, the mythical monster that lives in the loch at Ness, is said to be a different type of creature, a plesiosaur/pliosaur, both water-dwelling reptiles with very sharp teeth, the main difference being plesiosaurs had extremely long necks and pliosaurs were in the same family but had shorter necks. It has been swimming around for about a thousand years, though recent developments in sonar and other systems have all failed to locate it. The latter is a type of flying reptile, with wings almost identical to bats but unrelated to bats or birds. They might have hunted like gannets, diving into the sea, or they might have been more like land-dwelling birds. I am 99% sure that discoveries of pterosaurs inspired the stereotypical western dragon, but it is more likely that a different ancient species inspired the stereotypical eastern dragon. Either way, these flying reptiles ruled the skies for a bit more than a hundred million years, before the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period drove them all extinct. WARNING: that was 65 million years ago, and some experts think we’re already overdue for the next one!

I really like the book as it is so useful for even more than dinosaurs, but all prehistoric life. Because it spans such a vast time frame, and contains so many facts, descriptions, and interpretations, it is my go-to book for anything related to this area. It’s essential to learn about evolution, and mass extinctions, so we can prevent any more of the world’s weird and wonderful life forms becoming extinct. I feel that I wouldn’t be anywhere near so knowledgeable about dinosaurs without this book, and I can pass on that knowledge to others – someone asked on a group chat I’m on the other day what species of dinosaur she thought a fossil was, so although I couldn’t give an accurate answer, my idea was the same as hers (Compsognathus)!

One of my aims is to find a large(ish) fossil one day. So far, I have a few pieces of coral, a sea urchin or two, a small piece of fossilised tree, and not much more! However, we don’t live near the sea, so it’s less likely to find much. However, I’ll still keep digging in the garden!

RARRRRRR………

Hey Blog! This post is focusing on something I started in January but have not told you about – until now!

The Wildlife Trust is an organisation dedicated to preserving and restoring our natural habitat. Part of this is the active fieldwork, going out and doing stuff for the benefit of nature. The other part is connecting with people, particularly those who are going to do the bulk of the tidying up of the planet – the ones who will inherit it! Those are the small children who can be introduced to how wonderful it is to help those we share our planet with. Therefore, the trust has set up branches for young people, which include Nature Tots (preschool age), Wildlife Watch (primary school age to first few years of secondary), and Junior Rangers (teenagers). I am a member of both the Whistlestop Wildlife Watch, which Mum runs, and the Avenue Junior Rangers, however it is the second of these I am going to talk about, because on Good Friday I went to help at a public-facing family event!

The Good Friday event was open for all families, and was set up so that people could move around the field and visit every activity. There was more than just the Junior Ranger group there, but we were the only stall run by young people. Only four members of the group came on the day, one of whom was me, one of whom accidentally cut his thumb and went home, one of whom only stayed for a few minutes at our stall, and the final one was another home-ed person who I knew once and I haven’t seen since half a million years ago (AKA a couple of years before the pandemic).

The activity we were doing with the young families was a bird feeder making activity, making apple bird feeders. These are very simple. You simply core the apple, tie a knot in a piece of string to make a hanger, then poke a stick through the middle of the apple and through the loop in the string and there you have it! (You have to take care not to ram the corer into your hand, and not to slash yourself in the thumb when you’re holding it.) You hang the feeder up in the garden, and the birds perch on the stick to eat the apple. An optional extra is to poke some black sunflower seeds in the side, with a tiny hammer, for example the Kit Bailey© Certified Willow Stick Square Lashing Hammer™, which is a totally invented device made of two bits of stick tied together in a cross shape with a simple square lashing. I created a makeshift one when the group leader said we should have a miniscule hammer, and they worked, so I made a few more.

Quite a lot of people came to the event. We barely stopped from the point when the first family came over till late in the afternoon. There were only a few times when we could take stock of what we had left in the way of materials, but we had 60 apples at the start of the day, and by about 1-2 o’clock these had all run out! We then turned to making wooden bird feeders.

We used a brace-and-bit to make these feeders. This is a manual drill device, with a metal pole bent in a trapezium shape with a drill bit at one end and a knob at the other. You turn the handle in the top part of the trapezium and it turns the pole. The pole turns the drill bit, and the drill bit drills the wood. This cuts through the wood surprisingly fast, that is if the drill bit is sharp! Making this design of bird feeder, you drill four holes in two thin disks of wood, three of them in each piece in a triangle shape, and sharpen three sticks. These you push through both disks in the triangle shape, and tap down with a mallet. You then tie a piece of string through the other two holes, and stuff the thing with a couple of fat balls (bird food). You can also use wool, for nesting material, or anything else that birds may need. One of the people who made these was only two, but she still made most of it, though I had to finish off one or two of the holes and tie the string. Her dad afterwards complemented me on how I had handled it! It was a fun day, and I would like to do more public-facing events with the Rangers in the future!

Hey Blog! This one is going back to the very thing that gave this blog its name – the Shed!

To start on a very unusual route, the Welsh Scouts have a badge called the Dragon Award. You have to camp out at least once every month of the year to get the Bronze Dragon Award, and then you can continue and get the Silver, but I’m only doing the Bronze at the moment. I have done camps in most of the autumn months and in January with Scouts, and I also camped out over into my birthday, albeit only a few miles away! I am planning to finish the award this year, so I decided to camp out on the last night of March (the only night left after the rest of the month had gone by), which meant I had to use THE SHED! This is the first time I have slept in it (though I didn’t get much sleep) but as I said to Mum and Dad when I went in, “This is what I built it for!”

There isn’t space for a bed in the shed, so I had to use the hammock, which is very useful. There is however one difficulty with sleeping in a hammock, which is that it is curved, and once you’ve been lying in it for a while it’s not comfy to have your spine bent! For this reason, I spent the few hours of sleep curled up and trying to lie sideways to flatten the hammock. There is also the problem of some of the hammock being tight, and some being loose, so you have to be careful not to fall out if your head is in one of the sags! Then you have to deal with the sleeping bag sliding along because your head’s too heavy, but despite this it was a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone who has a shed! I made sure I was armed in case of burglars, with my club and half-whittled wooden letter-opener lying handy!

I took my phone, the keys to the house (in case there was an emergency), and a couple of magazines out to the shed. The secret password to let my parents in if they wated to was “Bed-in-a-Shed”. I created a makeshift land-based sailboat simulator when I was learning to sail, the tiller of which I have since modified into a latch for my door, which is really useful as it can only be opened from the inside and therefore I can choose who to let in – for instance, only those who knew the password! They didn’t use it, but I did sneak back into the house in the middle of the night to fetch my branded Home-Ed-in-a-Shed water bottle as I felt I needed a drink. By morning I was up in time for the Dawn Chorus, when all the birds wake up and sing, and then went back to sleep again for about an hour (difficult with the sunlight starting up). Then I went in. I had a plan to spring an April Fool on my parents, seeing as it was April Fools’ Day, but unfortunately they were up, so I couldn’t.

By completing my March camp I have got all months except April (which I have a plan for), May, June (which I also have a plan for), July, August and December completed for my Dragon Award. Yes, that is half the year not done, but is the glass half empty or half full? It’s up to you to decide.

To all those shed owners, I totally recommend camping out. It’s worth it. I could hear the frogs in our pond croaking all night, there was a dawn chorus to listen to, and if I had been up a little earlier, I would have seen the sunrise. One of these days I may go back out there, but for now, I hope you enjoy your shed!

Hey Blog! This post is unusual, as in this one I’m going to be explaining something I have been trying to explain for more than a year on Home Ed in a Shed – what home-ed is really like!

This post is really for those who ask us every time we go out what we do if we don’t go to school. I can’t answer for everyone, as every child is different, and one of the benefits of home-ed is that learning is totally child-specific. All of the families I know do things in a different way; some follow the school holidays, some follow workbooks and never do anything else, some just let the kids chose their learning. I’m aware that like any system people have conflicting opinions on what is the middle, but I’ll say it anyway: we try to stay in the middle if we can, taking breaks over roughly the same period as schools – but one of the advantages of this kind of learning is you can go when nobody else goes on holiday when it’s cheap so we don’t follow the terms exactly; learning what would be expected by college/university age, but going in detail about whatever interests us. Mum teaches me some things, and I do online classes for others, a few I do on my own, and occasionally I do totally my own thing like whittling in my shed or writing a crazy story with my friends. This blog is one of those that I do on my own, though Mum occasionally suggests a topic to write about.

I must state here that it doesn’t have to be a mum who does the learning with the child. Though it’s only mums who do it around here, Dad occasionally helps with science when Mum’s head starts hurting or I haven’t got on in the day and she wants some time out. Dad is the one who did welding with me in the garage over lockdown, who built the Home Ed Shed with me, and who I have long and complicated conversations with in the car when going places, with subjects ranging from how freezers work to how original Alice in Wonderland is!

To come to the most commonly asked question put to home-ed families, “How do you do your exams?”, as we choose to stay out of the school system we have to pay for our own education, including exams. Unfortunately they are very expensive, and I have not done any yet, though I will be starting a one-year GCSE-level study on Environmental Management from the amazing tutor at Humanatees in June. Also, contrary to most people’s belief, we do in fact go out with other children, and don’t stay home all the time. I am lucky to be living near Belper, as there is a brilliant community of home-ed families there, which we hang out with quite often. Unlike most of my friends, I also go to so-called ‘after-school’ things, such as Scouts and cricket, though I am the only home-ed kid there. It does feel like I’m a bit different, true, but then they all go to the same school so it would be like that.

Home education is very varied, as the child can choose the subjects it learns about, though I have to do basic maths, English and science. The fact that you can learn in a home environment is comforting for many people, so it’s hardly surprising that most of the people I hang out with are neurodiverse, with ADHD and Autism being the most common. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have the former of these, though we have not checked. On the whole, I would recommend home-ed for anyone who likes things that are not covered in the school system, is interested in being their own person, and is willing to do what society doesn’t like – that is, go against the norm and be a home-educated rebel, forging your own group of friends and your own identity. Hope to see you join the group soon!

Hey Blog! This post is about two things, and one often inspires the other! Welcome to a blog full of… floral poetry? Poetic florality? Let’s just say flowers and poems!

I can’t believe it – end of March already, a quarter of the year gone! This means spring is springing; the “toad season”, when amphibians are on the move (requiring dedicated volunteers to go out and help them cross the road) is in full swing; and for the purposes of this post, the first flowers have bloomed. Snowdrops from January are nearly finished, and daffodils are at their height. Bluebells will be along in April, filling my local wood with a carpet fit for a faery queen, or for you to go and marvel at. There is nothing else in the world that does what bluebells do, but they are fragile; just treading on them can knock them back a whole year, though they can still spread though bulbs. These beautiful plants are also poisonous if eaten, so don’t let your toddler in unsupervised!

All the flowers mentioned above have all had poems written about them, but a poem written about one of them is especially famous. You might have guessed – yes, Grandad, it is Daffodils by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, born in the 1700s, was at one point Poet Laureate – which leads on nicely to what comes next!

The current poet laureate is Simon Armitage. He is probably one of the most pressured poet laureates in history, as he has had to write poems for both Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and King Charles’s coronation, besides others! The most recent of his poems is one titled Plum tree among the Skyscrapers, and tells of the journey through history of the Plum tree (Prunus domestica), as she ‘travelled for years’ and ‘now here she is … in a city square’. For the full poem, see here. In response, I wrote my own poem, inspired by it, and I thought you might like to read it:

Hawthorn

Green-leaved boughs in summer,

To the russet fruits of autumn,

Grey-green thorns in winter,

And the white blossoms in spring,

 Fruit and thorns are one and all,

To the faery tree we sing.

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Of ye who stand before the gate,

Are any like to thee?

In maiden white yet the thorn of light,

With lichen and soft moss of green,

Guardian of wrong and right,

Daughter of the May Queen!

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Green-leaved boughs in summer, etc.

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Creeper of the hedgerows,

Prickly and gnarled,

All along the field side fence

Branches old and worn,

Stunted with the weight of years,

Old when I was born.

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Green-leaved boughs in summer, etc.

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Blossom flourishes like snow,

In hedges old and lawns,

From beside a fieldline wall,

Drifting petals softly fall,

Circled with a crown of thorns,

Ancient Spring and Lord-of-all!

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Green leaved boughs in summer,

To the russet fruits of autumn,

Grey-green thorns in winter,

And the white blossoms in spring,

 Fruit and thorns are one and all,

To the faery tree we sing.

I like it as it tells of past and future, and connects the two. It’s meant to be sung, but can be spoken. And of course, it’s all about the hawthorn blossoms, which are beautiful flowers. The ‘gate’ in the poem references the gate to the underworld, which the tree stood at in mythology. They have a strong connection to the faery folk, hope, and Christ’s crown of thorns was said to be made of it. Apparently, the DeLorean company got bad luck because they cut down a hawthorn tree to make room for a factory – maybe they should have made a cutting, thereby keeping it alive, and appeasing the faeries! Also, you can only cut of the wood in May, but remember, don’t kill it!

I hoped you liked this. Look out for flowers, be careful with the faeries, and read poetry. See you soon!

Hey Blog! For the second time in a row, this is another environmental issues post. This time we went to Derby Museums, for a nationwide project known as Wild Escape.

My Dad works in Derby, so we hitched a lift with him to get there. There were, however, five hours between arriving at 8 and the workshop at 1. This was the perfect time to go into the Book Café, a very nice café in Derby where there are most of the cakes you could come up with and a friendly atmosphere. We sometimes do this when we go to Derby, and it’s always fun. We had a drink each and read our books, and then I had a ‘Bakewell Blondie’ and Mum had another coffee. This meant she was absolutely buzzing while we were walking to the museum.

At the moment Derby Museums are hosting an art exhibition on the work of the 18^th century painter William Hogarth. While we waited for the other families attending the event, we popped in and had a look. There wasn’t much time, so we will probably go again, in which case it is likely to end up on this blog. However, we went down and met the member of the museum staff who was running the event, and when everyone had arrived, we started.

The first thing on the agenda was to go around the nature gallery and find your favourite animal. This could be because you had similar personalities, you looked something like them, or anything that meant you liked them. I chose the badger, as we share some personality traits and they are nice animals. Everybody chose different things, for instance someone chose a mole, another a red squirrel, another a kingfisher. We then did a poster making activity. There were four different poster subjects – badger, fox, wildcat, and hedgehog – and we had to make a poster with what we already knew and the knowledge they provided on printouts. There was one twist to this – we had to make it with only five words. Or less. I got the badger one – lucky, I know quite a lot about them and was able to include quite a bit of what I knew. If you want to know more about these stripy mammals, see last year’s ‘Badger Badger Badger’ post in which I talked about these amazing creatures in lots more detail.

Once we had made our posters, we went along to the activity room. In here there were four strips of cloth that we had the task of painting to make banners for the Wild Escape on Earth Day. This is when all the animals in the museum go out and “escape”, to remind us of the question “What would they do if they could?” Would they be able to get to their own habitat? The answer, with all the habitat loss, is probably no. However, in Derbyshire, badgers and foxes, and even hedgehogs, would almost certainly find somewhere, though probably not wildcats! But as the museum is in the city centre of Derby, the question is more “Would they be able to cross the roads safely or not before they got there?”!

When we had finished painting the banners, it was time to wrap up and go. It was certainly fun, though, and if I am free, I would like to go to the escape on Earth Day!