like it!

My toes are cold...

I've got home and my husband is poking through the 'CDs & DVDs to sell' pile. "Did you know there's a box set of recorder CDs in here?" I said yes, and he said he was just checking in case it was an accident.

I said no, it was deliberate as I didn't like it. He asked why. So I had to explain. The box set contains music I know, and music I don't. I listened to the music I knew (e.g. Handel's recorder sonatas) and while the right notes were there at the right time, it felt like the music was missing. And then on the music I didn't know, I just had the same feeling, that it was technically all correct but...<impossible to put in to words feeling>.

I was expecting him to look at me like I'd gone completely mad, but no. Instead he said:

"Ah, so like the difference between Aretha Franklin and Mariah Carey".

I grew up in Stevenage which must have been one of the most culturally deprived towns in England (for years the only place you could buy books was Smiths). Yesterday I was preparing my phonetics class and in the book I was using (written and published in France) was an extract from the Stevenage Gazette about a man who had been caught shop-lifting cassettes in Woolworths. As his defence he said that he had been drunk at the time and thought he was stealing books from the local library.

Just about sums up Stevenage I thought
But a totally bizarre thing to find in a book on phonetics.

If you're up at 3am this morning, there will be a total lunar eclipse, when the moon will turn a red colour!

ooo...have to try to remember to look out for that!

Why did I have a feeling you'd reply to this '3am Sarah' !

WOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

The father of one of my little Year 1s at Guildhall just won an Oscar for his film score for 'Atonement'!!!

Huge congratulations to Dario Marianelli!

Now that definitely deserves a or two...

I originally missed of the first few words and read it as:



And I thought either WOW or Hmm, he must have been a Year 1 quite a while ago!!!

The Blackwall Tunnel is closed.

The whole of South East London resembles a car park.

Interesting you should say this on a day I've been noticing the traffic around here because it's been quite busy; one tractor, one schoolbus, five cars and three vans although I think I may have counted the same van twice.... not to mention some cows, a buzzard (ok it wasn't using the road but it was sitting on the roadside fence) and a small flock of something flappy pecking at the salty grit near the verge.


And another thing, my business cards arrived from the printer yesterday and the designer has used a slightly different design from the proof he sent me (and I approved) and I just don't have the energy to argue because I'm too sick with the cold... WHY can't people just do what they're asked... WHY does every single little job have to be messed up by people not paying attention to detail. I guess this should be in the whinge section I think I'd fall over with shock if something actually occurred exactly to plan! What has happened to all the competent people???

someone has just given me some bubble-wrap to pop

Thats always fun... me and my sister sat for nearly an hour popping bubble wrap whilst watching television the other week

very therapeutic !

Bubble-wrap popping addicts might be interested in this digital version - you never run out of pops!

I got to the practice rooms at 8.00 and got thrown out just after 10.00 due to heavy demand. I'd only done half my practice schedule ... and had only just started on my Scriabin Preludes

Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo. Sob. sob. Wail.

Aw - commiserations.

have some bubble wrap to pop ...

Thanks. Very therapeutic. Done to the rhythm of Arthur Brown's " s#x Machine "

pop pop poooooop pop!
pop pop poooooop pop!

Get on the Scene ....

dooby dooby dooby dooby dooby dooby duh duh doooooo..... duh duh doooooo

pop pop poooooop pop!

I wonder how many people knew that skylarks were rockets?

I was just called a 'skink' by a first year...

A) Why? and B) What is is?

No idea


A lizard with no legs (i.e. like a snake - not one that has had them pulled off)

I'm not sure that one's reached Yorkshire in that context...

I've only lost 3 marks on all my music coursework and have consistantly been getting A*s in our mocks, yet I'm still predicted an A not an A* for music, and my teacher says she won't/can't change it
I know it seems so concieted and picky about it being an A not an A*, but it just annoyes me so much!!

Don't worry, D_F, I expect it's all to do with teacher performance. If enough pupils get higher grades than predicted it makes the teacher look good and keeps the Head off her back! It doesn't really matter what you're predicted at GCSE - the result you get is what counts - so don't give it another thought.

A lot of our teachers just didn't predict A*, as they saw it as a 'better A'. Also, IMO, if you get predicted top grades, you can only get worse, so the pressure is really on, as if you get anything other than the A*, you will feel a failure if that's what you were predicted. Whereas if you were predicted A, then got A*, you'd be really happy. did that make sense?

I agree. My son was predicted 9 A* and 1A - which is precisely what he got. Lots of hi friends did better than predicted and were really happy, whereas he just felt he'd done no better than expected.

I was predicted 8A*, 1A. What really got to me was that my english teacher predicted me A*s when i blatently was never going to get them (got an A and a B), so i spent most of the two years feeling a bit of a failure. Then, to the opposite extreme, the predicted A was for textiles, which, except perhaps for maths, was the subject i felt most certain I'd get A* in. Then, in art, i was predicted A*, because i was capable of getting one, but had to settle for 'just' an A in the end because i didn't have enough time to do the volume of work needed for the A*.

It's a hard life, ain't it.

I was predicted 11 A*s. I got 5A*s 4As and 2Bs, but that was because I was quite lazy and didn't do much work for my least favourite subject. It was very disappointing though, especially because I got full marks in all my English practice essays, messed up on the day and dropped a few - whilst my two friends both got in the top five marks, and got special certificates.

Still, your teacher is probably basically looking at you and thinking "yay! value added!" because your prediction is not given by them - it's based on your yr 9 SATs - all of them together, and is often the head of their department's choice after knowing the computer score... if that makes sense? As it happens if you do better than your prediction your teacher gets value added, if you do worse she gets value taken away - and if she doesn't get enough value added in a year she doesn't get her payrise... Which sounds sort of mercenary, but it's understandable that she'd want it.

That's also why she can't change it - if she changed the prediction of the whole class to U, she'd gets plenty of value added - it's like cheating.

(Can you tell my mum's a teacher?)

Just you wait...

I'm listening to Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street' at the moment, desperately trying to resist playing air guitar...

^ I love that song!


The clocks go forward this month!

27th March isn't actually terribly far away!

(Sorry, that might look like it's related to skylarks comment - it isn't! )

but made me wonder when the clocks do go forward - my diary thinks it's the 29th March.

Must be quite rare for it to be after Easter !

Easter is early this year !

It is just about as early as it can be ( I think I read somewhere that March 22 is possible).

Ash Wednesday was one calendar month after Epiphany - which was what first alerted me to this term's strange dates when I got choir dates sometime last year.

Talking of dates, isn't it a nuisance when Mother's Day falls on a Sunday?

April 2nd isn't that far away either!!

Peas are such an inconvenient shape

I disagree. They're nice and spherical so that they pile up nicely and you can roll them around on your plate and squash them with your fork when necessary.

I'm worried about ARCO....... and the Widor Toccata - it's just mush at the moment.

Try eating them with chopsticks ! Even more fun.

Chopsticks! Im hopeless with them , even after many trips to the Far East. You might think we pianists would have the dexterity to use them, but I always end up asking for a fork !

Having just broken through 9,000 posts, do I get a cake with 9,000 candles on it?

Only if you can blow them out in one puff! . Congrats on the 9000 posts though. Who has most at the moment ??

I've got a very long way to go to catch the top poster, which at the moment is nicki_flute on 27,418. Car Expert is only just behind...

Congratulations Barry ! I see you're coming up fast ...

: )

Well done Barry. Got your swimming trunks ready for Anglesey??
Bev.