Mr. Waffle: Do you know how brackets work, Miss?
Herself: Yes, you do the operation inside the brackets first. We did that last year.
Mr. Waffle: What is the Irish for brackets then?
Herself (coldly): Maths is a universal language.*
*Translation: I don’t know.
We visited the site of the Battle of the Boyne a number of years ago. It made a lasting impression on the children. The other night, Michael asked me for a Jacobite biscuit. Some probing revealed that he meant a Jacob’s cream cracker. That is all.
The parent of a colleague died and I sent him a mass card. I wrote a few lines hoping that my colleague was bearing up and that his father was “well before he died.” Really? Beautifully put. Go me. What, was I hoping that the gentleman had been hale and hearty and run over by a car? I despair.
For the last number of weeks, the children have been waving chopsticks around and shouting “Stupefy” and “Expelliarmus”. They have printed off lists of spells from the internet which is disturbingly thorough in this regard. They are working their way through them. This game is showing no signs of palling. Daniel, who is chameleon-like in relation to accents, has decided that an English accent is best for casting spells, so we have a little boy with glasses running around, waving a chopstick and shouting out Latin(ish) words in an English accent. It’s all very odd.
I was in a bric-a-brac shop with herself and there was an old bakelite phone which she rather liked. The nice lady behind the counter said, “I have one plugged in here, do you want to try ringing your mother’s mobile?” We laughed as she poked at the cumbersome dial in amazement. Of course, she went wrong half way through and had to start again. “Push down the buttons where the receiver goes until you get a dial tone” we said. She looked at us in disbelief – really how primitive was this system? Wait until I tell her you had to wait three months to get a phone when I was a child. And that you rang the operator and gave the name of the town and asked for a number, in the case of our country cousins, this was 42. It turns out that 35 years is quite a long time.
A colleague who used to be a maths teacher pressed a book upon me and I am really enjoying it. The Princess and I were out for a cup of tea and each of us was reading her book. I looked up and said to her, “I’m really enjoying this, the author says that finding something in maths is like discovery not invention. Isn’t that clever? It’s out there waiting to be found. And you can see that’s true. I mean look at pi. It’s a constant for any circle and it’s true for every circle even if we didn’t know what it was. Isn’t it fascinating?” Pause. “Do you know what pi is?” Herself, coldly, “No, I am only 9, you know.” I returned to my book, suitably chastened.