NotSheep

I’m again resorting to microblogging to remember what has been going on since my last post here. With Twitter’s abandonment of those of us outside North America, I’m one of those who have switched to Brightkite - which, I have to say, is very nice. Still in beta though, and invitation-only. I’ve no more invites left, but I’m assured they are replenished regularly, so if you want one and don’t know where else to find one, send me your email addy and I’ll send you one when I get some more.

Anyway. Children have continued to be, er, children. And teenagers. Well, one teenager. And he has, over the last week, swung between being delightful and inciting me to murderous threats. This adolescence business isn’t much easier on parents than on the adolescents themselves. Barney has been teaching Louie to talk - he’s quite convinced that Louie’s emerging vocalising is because of his talking to him. And one day last week, when he’d been holding a crying Louie for a minute or two while I was busy in the kitchen, I returned to find Barney in tears, because Louie was. But then on Thursday, he was so grumpy that I sent him out to post a letter, in the hope that some fresh air would improve his mood - and on Monday, he was lucky to make it through the day alive. But then Monday was like that for everyone, including me. We were all horrible versions of what we are. Not a good start to the week.

Bedtimes: Toby has been amusing. In response to Jack’s bedtime-delaying tactic of “I’m thirsty!”, came Toby’s reply: “No! It’s Eddensday!” Another evening it was Toby’s turn to resist going to sleep. I called from my room, where I was nursing Louie, “Go to sleep!” - Toby yelled back, “I’m not talking to you! I’m talking to Daddy!”

Toby was a bit off-colour yesterday - he woke late, then went back to sleep (rather than bounce past us all demanding breakfast, as he usually does), finally came downstairs and lay on the sofa, where he fell asleep again. He brightened after lunch though, and seemed to be completely recovered by the evening.

Louie has been getting smiley, and doesn’t seem so much like a newborn now. I really need to take more photos before he’s a teenager like Barney! In the four-minute breaks I get when he’s happy to be with someone else, I’ve been clearing out the dining-room - the rule in this house seems to be that anything you have in your hands should be deposited on the nearest flat surface - and with the dining-room table being 1.5 metres square, it’s got a lot of flat surface, and therefore a lot of junk on it. And that’s before we even consider the numerous bookshelves… it’s nearly done now - but why is it that when you clear out and tidy and organise any room, there are always five items left at the end which have no home to go to?

I phoned the exams officer at the school where Barney sat his French GCSE, to ask about his mark for the spoken component, which was the only bit we hadn’t received. We weren’t worried about it; we knew that bit wasn’t going to pull his average down, and indeed he scored one mark less than in his highest component. Barney’s planning to do his maths GCSE next, and the exams officer seemed quite enthusiastic about that idea - which is useful, as he’s also the maths teacher He explained how the exam works, what the papers are, etc, and which book the school uses - we might buy it, but I’ll try to find it somewhere to have a look at it first. The book that Barney’s been using is very dry (Edexcel IGCSE). We had friends staying over on the weekend, and they arrived with a selection of maths GCSE textbooks, so we’ll have a look at those too. Barney and I went to meet said friends at Ikea on Friday before they came (Ikea being a lot closer to us than it is to them), and we planned to have lunch there - but Barney, being a 13-year-old boy, was certain he’d starve if we had to wait for their arrival, so we had almost finished our lunch by the time our friends arrived and bought theirs. The boys - theirs aged 14 and 12 and mine aged 13 - chatted while they waited for food - subject matter: Yugi-Oh and girls. It’s an interesting age… We then had a walk around Ikea while our friends planned new bedrooms in their loft, during which Barney discovered his mobile phone was missing - it probably fell out of his trouser-pocket, given how much stuff he had crammed in there. Fortunately it was found and returned to us by the security staff. The phone itself isn’t worth much, but the loss of all the photos Barney has taken of Toby and Louie - well, that would certainly have upset him.

We enjoyed our friends’ visit; as is usual, the kids bounced about and occasionally argued, and the adults talked and ate. And it certainly made for an early night after they left - my lot, having been up late the night before and not stopped moving since their friends arrived, were asleep at varying times between about 7.10 and 8.20.

Also on Friday, I visited the local bike shop (to get an inner tube for a stroller tyre) and discovered there’s a cycling club which operates from there. Barney’s very keen on the idea, so he’s going to swing by the shop on his bike sometime and let them see if it’s adequate for him to participate or if he’d need to upgrade (I hope the former!) And I went to the garden centre to look for pots for my houseplants - and managed to soak myself when I picked up a set of three pots without realising they were full of rainwater - I poured it all down my front, and had to wring out my tee-shirt. I did get some pots though, and picked up two hanging-baskets for £1 each - on clearance because the plants were nearly dead - but I only wanted them for the baskets anyway!

Hm, what else? I got all retro and bought a DVD of Grease from ebay, and we all watched it several times - the first time any of the boys had seen it. They all enjoyed it, although Freddy stated that it was “okay…but I prefer movies with violence.” Hm. Quite astonishing how many of the lyrics I remember!

I did some investigating to see what our best deals for phone and broadband would be, and discovered that our local exchange has been local-loop-unbundled - which in theory means we should be able to get faster broadband at a lower cost - but in practice, in our case, means nothing at all. Of the three ISPs which are LLU-enabled on our exchange, one of them won’t provide us with broadband because it reckons we’re too far from the exchange and we won’t be happy with the service, and the other two are AOL and TalkTalk - neither of which I’d go with if they were free. So it looks like we’ll be staying with Newnet - we could switch to another ISP which isn’t one of the above and save about £1 a month, but Newnet’s service has been very good, so it really isn’t worth it. Would be nice not to live at the opposite end of town from the telephone exchange though.

I know, I know, it’s a bit of a shock - a post arriving only three four days after the previous one (assuming I get this post finished tonight - it’s entirely possible I’ll still be writing it on Monday… got it done on Sunday!) - but there you go. I blame the weather. I know there’s no reason why the weather should affect the frequency of my blogging, given that it’s just the same right now as it has been for weeks, but I’m blaming it for everything else, so why not? I was tempted to turn on the central heating on Thursday, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that summer might be over, given that it never seemed to have started. But I resisted, told anyone who complained to put on a sweater (and socks! - is it only my children who don’t wear socks unless absolutely necessary?) and let the body-heat of six children warm up the room.

We’ve been doing a bit of skoolwork this week: mostly English - learning about punctuation and writing stories and suchlike - and history. History wasn’t my thing at all when I was at school; it was years before I realised that I was actually quite interested, but that the way it had been taught in school had completely put me off. Slavedriver that I am, I even sat the boys down to some studying this yesterday afternoon - mainly because they were starting to bicker, and I could see they needed a bit of guidance in what to do for a while. We even sat at the dining-room table, the surface of which hadn’t been seen for nearly a year before this week. Between pregnancy-and-not-feeling-very-well and then the end-of-pregnancy-and-not-feeling-very-well, I hadn’t put anything away properly in a very long time - and nobody else does it! I put both pcs back in the dining-room too, and I want to get a long narrow desk of some sort to put them on, so I went off to Ikea this yesterday morning in search of solutions, but it didn’t provide any. Most of the laptops still live under a sofa, although it’s a different sofa these days - our neighbour offered us hers. It’s in perfectly good shape; it just doesn’t go with her new decor. It goes with ours though, and we can certainly use the extra seating, so we had to make some space in the living-room. As a result of that, we also refreecycled our Mac (i.e. we acquired it via Freecycle and now we’ve disposed of it by the same route). It was collected yesterday on Friday morning by a lovely woman who arrived with her two-year-old son and stayed for a cup of tea - and who confessed to still nursing her son and seemed relieved to discover I was even weirder than she was. I mentioned my blog, and she asked where she could find it, so M, if you’re reading this - hello! and *waves*

Huge pile of post this morning yesterday; I think they’ve been saving it up all week. There was a letter giving us another speech therapy assessment for Toby. We do very few medical-type appointments, so of course this one has been conveniently arranged for exactly the same day and time as the dental appointment I made months ago for all of us. There was also a pile of envelopes from Film Education - I’d booked several films for National Schools Film Week, figuring that it would be the same as the last couple of years, and we’d not get tickets for some and others would be cancelled - but we’ve had confirmation for all of them. We’ll be square-eyed (or wide-screen-eyed) by the end of the week.

Jack cut a chunk of his hair off yesterday on Friday. He’s blaming Barney, who apparently put toothpaste in his hair - don’t ask me why. As I said in my previous post, it’s up and down and up and down with Barney at the minute. He phoned his “French family” last on Friday night; they were away through August, so he hadn’t had a chance to tell them about his French GCSE result - in fact he hadn’t even told them he was doing the exam, because he wanted it to be a surprise. We’re glad they’re all well

We’re around the table again this morning (really today this time), doing things like making databases and mindmaps. Toby is at a pc, playing a Tots TV game about letter shapes and sounds. And I’m about to print off instructions for origami throwing stars - an activity I’m sure will go down well

We aimed to leave the house by 9 o’clock this morning - or rather, I aimed to do so; nobody else seemed to have any intention of being out before lunchtime. We walked out the door at 9.33.

Why would we leave the house so early? (The schoolies can stop laughing - it’s early for us.) Well, several children needed haircuts. There’s a barber-shop in town where the guy does a good job reasonably cheaply, so that’s where we go (unless I do it myself). The only problem is that he takes his time - which is not a bad thing, I suppose, but he takes half an hour per customer. It doesn’t seem to matter how old his customer is, or how much hair he has - it’s always half an hour. And he doesn’t make appointments - it’s first-come, first-served. So if there are three other customers waiting when you arrive, you can assume you’ll be leaving the barber’s chair at some point between two and two-and-a-half hours in the future. If you manage to get there first thing in the morning, the odds of being the first or second customer are good, so it takes less time.

I was going to leave Barney there with Jack, because Jack was the shaggiest child, and also because he cut off a hank of his own hair a week ago. But when I thought about the whole waiting-for-them thing, I decided to leave George, Freddy and Jack there, with dire warnings about best behaviour ringing in their ears (the last time I left them there, they were asked to wait outside the shop because they were messing about so much). And I took Barney, Toby and Louie with me to do some errands.

I got a parking space just across the road from the bank, and reversed into it - and noticed lots of smoke moving upwards past the driver’s door… There were no warning lights on, it had been driving fine, no odd noises etc. I opened the bonnet/hood and all looked fine there (as if I’d know if something looked wrong, but anyway). So I went to the bank, and when I came back, everything still seemed fine. The car started without any more smoke, and I drove off, intending to find someone who could tell me whether this was a get-it-serviced-soon situation or a get-it-towed-now one.

I did one errand before returning to collect Jack from the barber, and asked the barber if he knew of a mechanic. He recommended his own - just a couple of miles away. Jack’s hair wasn’t finished yet, so I headed to the mechanic without him. The mechanic looked around and under my car, tested the brakes, had a look at the engine, made some noises…and announced that he reckoned I’d collected a plastic bag. The smoke had been the remnants of the plastic bag burning off. Bring on the plastic-bags tax, I say. It would make more sense than penalising larger families with higher road-tax anyway.

Back for Jack, leaving George and Freddy to continue their best-barber-shop-behaviour, and the rest of us went to the library. George and Freddy walked to the library to meet up with us - the first time they’ve been unsupervised in town. We spent a pleasant hour in the library despite Toby falling face-first onto the corner of a table, and despite the return of the grumpy-knickers librarian I’ve written about before. Today as I browsed holding Louie, she picked up the sock that had fallen off his foot onto the floor and said “You lost this” with a disapproving look. And when we were getting our books issued (by another librarian) she came over and asked if she could help. I handed her the book that Toby was borrowing, and she issued it with a “oh for heaven’s sake” look. I do think she’d be happier if nobody came into the library at all. I heard about another even worse librarian this week who’d closed the library because the computers weren’t working, and when told by a family that they were there for the books, said they could come in but she wouldn’t turn the lights on because it would only attract more people

(Before anyone thinks I’m down on librarians - I’m not! Most of ours are great - and I used to be one myself, so I know there’s a wide range of people in the business!)

While we were there, Toby was wandering around; I asked what he was doing and he replied in an off-hand tone, “Just looking for a book.” Uhuh.

What else happened this week…oh, I had an extremely spendy cup of tea. It wasn’t very costly to start with - what’s the cost of a single teabag anyway? - but when it leapt out of my hands and all over my laptop keyboard, it suddenly became quite a lot more expensive. I did hope the laptop might recover once it was taken apart and dried out - in my experience Toshiba laptops take quite a bit of abuse before they give up - but the keyboard was a goner. I was lucky enough to find a small local company specialising in laptop repairs and so my laptop went to visit them on Wednesday while we all went to visit friends. I hadn’t realised how beat-up my old keyboard was until I saw it next to the new one and realised that once upon a time it, too, had had keys with textured surfaces. They’re all flat and shiny now!

We’d a Beavers parents meeting on Tuesday - the other Leaders weren’t sure if I was coming back, but I might as well, because it’s not worth coming home between leaving Jack off and picking him up. As expected, I’ve been asked to do the programming again this year. Beavers starts again on Tuesday, so this weekend will find me scouring websites for activity ideas.

Freddy and George went to ju-jitsu on Monday; George had a meltdown on his return because he was the last one out of the car and managed to get himself locked in. I thought maybe he didn’t realise that the driver’s door opens from the inside even if it’s locked, but he told me he didn’t even know if the other doors were locked or not He thought he’d be there all night - even though he knew that Scratchy would be going out again later to collect Barney from Air Cadets

Scouts and Cubs and St John Ambulance Cadets were all back this week too. By yesterday, there were lots of tired grumpy children - they’ve got too used to lazing about over the summer. I think we were all ready for the summer break in activities, but I also think the boys are very ready to return to them now. It’ll be easier once they’ve been back into the usual routine for a week or two - I hope.

*cough* Excuse me while I *hack and splutter*

The lurgy got us good. Scratchy was sick last weekend, and by the time he was getting better, it was Monday, he was back to work, and the rest of us were getting it. Fevers, coughs, sneezing - a houseful of it. Barney went off to a Battle of Britain thing with Air Cadets, but the rest of us spent the entire weekend at home. Monday too found us sitting around the house feeling sorry for ourselves. Someone phoned from the speech therapist’s office to say she had to cancel Toby’s appointment on Tuesday morning - I’d phoned a week earlier to cancel it, as it was booked for the same time as our dental appointment. Another one has been made for the end of the month. And Jack, gazing at Louie, said thoughtfully, “I wonder what his favourite colour will be when he grows up?” Ah, yes, the things we all wonder about - what our children will do for a living, what kind of person they’ll be, will they have their own children, and what their favourite colour will be.

On Monday evening Barney chose to go to bed rather than Air Cadets - he said he didn’t feel ill, but was finding it hard to cope (with us being sick, he said, but I suspect it was more like himself being told off). Freddy did go to ju-jitsu, but George was feverish and went to bed. Right before Scratchy left with Freddy, he brought me a cup of tea - and I still can’t believe what I did with it. Remember my expensive cup of tea last week? Well, this one tried to compete. Yup, I managed to pour another cup of tea all over my laptop. Scratchy pulled the keyboard out immediately, in the hope that we could dry it before any damage was done, but he also pulled off a clip that holds a bit of it in, and so when he tried to reassemble it later, he couldn’t. Tuesday morning found me waiting at the laptop repair place for it to open, and sheepishly saying, “You’ll never guess what I’ve done…” The bloke was very restrained and didn’t laugh. And fortunately it didn’t require a new keyboard this time, so it wasn’t nearly as expensive. Still, I do hope this isn’t one of those things that come in threes…

I’d have been in bed on Tuesday morning had it not been for the laptop thing and the dental appointments. We got to the dentist’s with time to spare, and sat in the waiting-room watching television and wondering why on earth anyone would ever go on one of those talk-shows. They’re so dysfunctional that it makes us look positively boring. We all had our teeth checked - even Toby was willing this time - and no treatments were needed, although Barney was reminded of the importance of cleaning well and Jack was found to have a little bit of deterioration of the enamel - no decay though, and it’s a milk-tooth, so with luck it will be falling out before it gets to the point of needing anything done. Our dentist is really lovely, and the kids actually want to go see her, and argue over who will go in her chair first. I found it quite difficult being in the chair - the lights reminded me of an operating theatre, and that isn’t a good thought for me right now - but I managed to handle it, just about.

On the way back home, I felt some little buttons on the back of my steering-wheel that I hadn’t noticed before. It turns out I have controls for the stereo on the steering-wheel. I had those on the Peugeot (although on the front of the wheel, which is why it never occurred to me to look on the back of it!), and I’d missed them when it went. Now I’m wondering what else I’ve missed. I know I still haven’t figured out all the CD-player bit, nor am I entirely sure what the switch on the rear-view mirror is all about.

On Tuesday, Barney went off to St John Ambulance Cadets, but Jack wasn’t even nearly well enough to go to the first Beavers meeting of the year - he was actually grey at one point - and I’m going to have to organise a GP visit for him, as the inhaler he got from the hospital back in April is almost finished. I hate to think he might actually have asthma, but it does look very much like it I went off to Beavers though, hacking and sneezing and taking Louie and a programme with me, and the other Leaders ran things while I cuddled Louie. When I got home, I witnessed a new gold standard for optimism - and from an unlikely source - when Scratchy offered me a cup of tea

By Wednesday morning, Barney too had succumbed, and spent the day feeling feverish and horrible. Again, it might have been a pyjama-day but for another appointment - having noticed how grubby the sofas were, and having realised that I wasn’t going to have time to clean them myself anytime in the next, oh, five to ten years, I decided to pay someone to do it. The cleaning-guy came on Wednesday morning, and removed an amazing amount of dirt from the two sofas, as well as an even more amazing amount from the floor-rug. Once he’d left, we had lunch and then we all went to bed/sofa/floor-with-blankets in my room and watched movies. George and Freddy were well enough for Cubs, but there was no way Barney was going to make it to Scouts. And on Thursday he was in big-time adolescent mode - he never gets his own way, everyone else gets treated better than him, his life sucks, etc. By Friday he was largely recovered, and asked why I was still sick when he was better - hm, yes, well, maybe life does suck.

We’re mostly better now, and even managed a bit of skool on Friday and yesterday. Jack’s still breathing a bit heavily, and I’m still coughing a lot, and Louie has a runny nose (although I’m hoping he’s missed out on the worst of it. I think we’re all hoping for a more pleasant week this week. Keep your fingers crossed for us - and for my laptop keyboard

We’ve been geocaching. We don’t own a GPS or a sat-nav or anything, but we weren’t going to let that stop us

Cold…

Still cold…

Getting warmer:

Oooh, burning fingers!

Wahey!

It was good fun, and I think we might have to consider asking Santa for a sat-nav system so we can actually do it properly. We know the area where this cache is hidden, and managed to establish its location fairly accurately by zooming in on the Google satellite image - but I suspect that won’t get us very far for most of them!

If you don’t know what geocaching is, have a look here for info.

It’s been a busy few days, making up for lost time while we were sick, and trying to get back into some semblance of a routine - lost completely over the summer while I wasn’t up to running the place. As mentioned, we went out geocaching; afterwards the kids made most of sunny weather by staying at the park for as long as possible, but Louie had had enough, so I brought him home and we had a peaceful hour in the house before everyone else came back.

Tuesday night saw Jack back to Beavers (having missed the week before due to being ill). I can honestly say that I like every one of our current Beavers - sometimes you get a kid who you really wish didn’t come, but ours are all terrific right now. Some of them were quite challenging at first (I’m thinking of one in particular here, who was horrendous at the beginning - I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a second! - but he has settled well and enjoys it so much that he is cooperative and charming now!) I daresay we’ll get a few new kids over the next few weeks, and we have a few who will be moving up to Cubs shortly too. We’d a good meeting, making paper monsters which stood up (sort of), and we played games, and then at the end I chose the “most monstrous monster” - no prizes or anything, but the boy who made the most monstrous one was happy

On Wednesday morning I attempted to get everyone out to the library, but before we knew it, it was lunchtime, and then before we knew it, it was mid-afternoon, and I decided not to bother. My hospital notes finally arrived - full of inaccuracies, most of which don’t matter much but a couple of them really need corrected. They confirmed that I was indeed jabbed all over while I was unconscious in attempts to insert IVs (I knew because of all the needle-holes and bruises they left!) There’s no pathology report on the fibroid, and I’ve asked the records people to investigate that, because I was told that it was definitely sent to the pathology lab, and it’s something I do want to see. There’s very little from the consultant obstetrician - just a copy of a discharge letter to my GP (who’s never even clapped eyes on me) and a note, made after he visited me the day after the c-section, that I was an “ungrateful patient” - I suspect he expected lots of grovelling and licking of boots, whereas what he got from me was “yes, I understand why it was necessary, but it will take a while for me to get my head around it”. Reading the notes has felt like - well, a bit of an anti-climax, really. They haven’t provided any more information than I already had, and they haven’t filled in any of the bits I don’t remember. I think I was expecting some kind of closure from getting the notes, but I mostly still just feel numb.

On Thursday morning I announced that I was leaving the house for the library at 9.30 and anyone who wasn’t ready could sit in the car in their pyjamas. Strangely, everyone was ready to go when I was! Before going to the library, we stopped at a nearby churchyard to look for another geocache. We didn’t find the cache, but we did find lots of interesting headstones, many of them from the nineteenth-century: a stone put up in memory of three brothers, one of whom was buried there while the other two were buried in the US and Australia; another marking the grave of a woman in her 20s along with her three-year-old and ten-month-old children (three different dates of death), then, years later, her husband and his second wife; several headstones with the name of the family our area of town is called after; and one for a man who’d been Lord Mayor of Belfast. The oldest headstone we were able to read was for someone who died in 1801, but there were lots of others which were so worn that the words were no longer legible, and which are almost certainly older - the church itself was built in the 1180s - yes, the eleven-eighties! - around the same time as the Castle, and by the same person. Who needs books and classrooms to study history?

At the library, we returned lots of books and discovered that the grumpy librarian was on duty again, so I waited until she took her coffee break before I went up to talk to someone about two books which had been returned but were still on the computer system as being borrowed by us. Their computer system is a disaster - it regularly refuses to let me log in, it has all the boys’ records linked to mine but sometimes won’t let me see what one of them has borrowed (while letting me access the other records), the search often doesn’t find things that are in the library (or even showing up as borrowed by me!), and it regularly tells me I’ve borrowed things I’d never heard of. Last Tuesday it showed a book on Barney’s record that he’d never heard of, but didn’t list one of the books he had borrowed, and my own record was even worse, with none of the five books I’d borrowed showing up, instead listing nine copies of the same book - one I’ve never heard of…

Friday was quiet, but Saturday found me cooking up a storm - maple baked beans for dinner, served with bread and with brownies for dessert - all home-made from scratch. On Saturday morning, Barney and George and I studied geometry - planning a new table for the kitchen. We have a sort-of-breakfast-bar table-thing in the kitchen - the cupboards and counter come out into the middle of the room, with an octagonal table stuck on the end, but with a bit cut out of it to make it fit around the end of the cupboard - and the table is table-height, rather than countertop-height. It’s a very workable system, but unfortunately doesn’t fit more than four comfortably, so we end up eating in the conservatory (when it’s warm enough) or the dining-room (when it’s tidy enough) or with some of us standing up in the kitchen holding our plates. So we’re experimenting to see what the best solution would be, and I think the easiest and most effective thing to do would be to get a table or piece of countertop cut to replace the current table-top. Same fitting-around the cupboards, but bigger. It doesn’t need to be a lot bigger to increase the perimeter by quite a bit, so it won’t take up a lot more of the room, especially if, instead of adding more chairs, we add stools for people to sit on.

Hence one of our errands today was to Ikea, to investigate countertops and tabletops and stools, amongst other things. I finally succumbed and bought Toby one of their mini-Poang chairs. I had Barney, Jack and Louie with me, while George, Freddy and Toby had stayed at home with Scratchy, but we all met up for lunch and watched the planes landing and taking off as we ate - half of the restaurant walls are made of glass and overlook the runway. The original plan was for Barney to stay at home today - his choice - while Scratchy dropped me off with Jack for an appointment with a homeopath, and then for Scratchy to go to the Asian supermarket before coming back for us - but Barney was so incredibly grumpy and horrid to everyone this morning (and yesterday evening) that I decided he wasn’t to be trusted at home alone. So instead I had to take my car and find a parking-space in one of the most difficult areas of the city, and then go to the Asian supermarket myself. Meanwhile George was having meltdowns at home *sigh*. After our appointment, on the walk back to the car, Barney and Jack collected conkers, but it was the only bit of the day when Barney was at all pleasant. He was back to hormonal and grumpy by the time we got part-way around Ikea, and stayed that way all the way home. Jack listened to nothing anyone told him all afternoon, and Freddy had a tantrum because he wasn’t allowed to sit in the front seat of the car on the way home! By the time dinner came around, I was ready to send them all to bed hungry, but instead Barney was sent to his room to decide whether he wanted to spend his days at home with the rest of us or at school where we wouldn’t have to put up with him. Having decided he’d rather make the effort to treat the rest of us civilly, Barney has gone to Air Cadets this evening, while George and Freddy are at ju-jitsu. Me? I’m going to bed!