NotSheep

I’m trying to remember what’s been going on over the last while. Not a lot, it has to be said, and yet I can’t remember much of it at all.

I know there have been children singing. One child in particular - let’s call him “George”, whose taste in music is…well, let’s just say it’s questionable. And the almost-three-year-old brother has started to sing along. And so I have had various irritating tunes stuck in my head, including “Ooh ah ooh ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang”, “We are the winners. Of Eurovision. We are we are”, and “Burn baby burn, disco inferno”. Yes, I know those aren’t their official titles, but they’re the bits that got stuck in my head. If they’re stuck in your head too now, at least I’ve got company. Someone (George has no idea who or how) stood on George’s mp3 player and cracked the glass covering the screen, so now he sings the same tune for hours and hours days and days on end - at least when he has the mp3 player, the tunes vary. He’s still singing along (although he denies this emphatically if you point it out), but there’s not the same earworm factor.

The child who is responsible for the earworms also managed to get stuck in the airing cupboard. He was playing hide-and-seek and climbed inside. I suggested (after his rescue) that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to hide in a cupboard whose door had no handle on the inside. He told me there was a handle on the inside of the airing-cupboard door (I’ve never noticed it - never had a need for it, to be honest). So why couldn’t he get out? Because he’d been squatting on the top shelf and couldn’t reach that far down

I’ve worked on reading with Jack. He could read, if only he’d accept that the word he needs is made by the sounds which are represented by the squiggles on the page. But he’s convinced that he always knows which word it’s supposed to be, regardless of what those squiggles might be. I now realise that there was a warning sign of this several months ago, when he read “cuh, rrr, ih, sss, puh, sss” and then muttered under his breath, trying to make the squiggles fit what he knew the word to be: “packet…”. This week we’ve had “fff, oh, x…wolf!” I don’t know why I’m surprised; Jack’s personality is such that he always knows better than everyone else. No matter who or what the subject. I present more evidence: a few days ago, he tried to teach his father to make toast. In a toaster. The put-in-bread-press-lever-wait-for-it-to-pop-up kind. How could a man in his 40s possibly know better than Jack?

I’ve got a bad case of cabin-fever, but since I don’t feel up to driving yet, I’m largely stuck at home. Scratchy is back at work tomorrow, so then I’ll be even more stuck, since there’ll be nobody around who’s able to take me anywhere. I’ve begged for visitors, but few have come. Maybe I’ve been sounding too miserable, or maybe I’ve hardly any friends. I did get out today though. Scratchy drove me, along with Louie, Toby, Jack and Barney, into town, where there’s a pleasant little playground by the shore, and Barney helped supervise Toby and Jack and I fed Louie, and Scratchy drove back home for George and Freddy. And then, after all children were hot and sweaty and thirsty and scabby-kneed (well, not all scabby-kneed, but several anyway), we went for ice-cream. I wish there was more than one Baskin-Robbins on this island - or at least that the one-and-only was closer to here. The local stuff just doesn’t compete.

Anyway, it was good to get out and breathe the fresh air and get the sea-breeze. And gaze longingly at the yachts. If I won the lottery (unlikely, since I don’t buy tickets), I think I might go and live on a boat. I’d probably only last a week, but it’s one of those things I fancy trying, y’know?

It’s very quiet here now, because Toby is asleep and the older boys - the older four boys - are off cycling with Scratchy. They went out yesterday and cycled way down the hill and way back up it again; I was surprised by how well Jack managed, given that he’s only six and has a bike with no gears or anything that might help on hills. And they all enjoyed it so much yesterday that when we got back from town today, they asked to go again. I’m glad to see them getting out - the weather hasn’t been agreeable for the last few weeks and they haven’t been out enough. The forecast for the coming week (and the week after) is rain, and then more rain - so they’d better make the most of the sun while it’s here.