Quotable quotes

I've been piecing a quilt for Biggest Granddaughter - using the same design as I used for Littlest Granddaughter's, only there are going to be triangles in one of the borders. (Possibly. I've never done triangles so we'll see.) I'm intrigued by how the pattern is achieved, which I, not being a person with much spatial awareness, wouldn't have thought of. You make nine-patches, as above, and then cut them down and across, thus:

and then rearrange them thus. (Don't look too closely.) And then sew them all together and so on. I'm sure it's a common patchwork technique but I'm easily impressed. Her favourite colour is yellow and she wanted lots of animal fabrics, including guinea pigs.

I've got quite a long way to go yet.

Daughter 1 and I took her and her brother to the Camera Obscura on Saturday. There were lots of optical illusions to amuse them. It's such fun to be a reasonably large part of their lives.

I said sentimentally to Grandson the other day, "I hope that when you're a big boy, you'll remember coming to our house to play."

He looked at me in amazed dismay. "Can't I still come here when I'm a big boy?"

Of course you can, my darling boy!

I do love the things they say. The other day, Grandson looked in the cupboard in what used to be Son's room and discovered the Lego trainset. He bore it downstairs and said with warm satisfaction, "You never know what you'll find in a good cupboard."

Meanwhile biggest Granddaughter played with Lego pirates. "The pirate raft," she murmured to herself, "sailed elegantly past the railway."

And on Tuesday, she and I went to the Botanics. It was rather chilly but then the sun came out. "That's nice," she remarked. "I can feel myself relaxing already."

Oh, they're such a joy!

Why I haven't yet discovered the mysteries of the universe

Daughter 2 came up with Granddaughter the Youngest for a few days, which was LOVELY. This gave me the incentive to finish her cot quilt. The colours were chosen to match her bedroom, which has white walls, crimson curtains and a bedside rug of stripes of various reds, lilacs and blues.  I decided to try quilting the middle part in an  overall wiggly pattern, which was quite labour-intensive but worked fairly well. I'm not sure I'd do it again - possibly it detracts from the patchwork design? - but I quite like it. I wanted to do hearts around the edge, though, because (obviously) I love her.

On a whim, I did the back in random patches, though I now wish I'd used fewer of the darker red fabrics (although the red isn't nearly as scarlet as it looks here). Still, it was an interesting experiment. Of course I hadn't really thought it out and it was more of a fiddle than I'd expected to get the back oblong corresponding to the front one, which it needed to do for the quilting. Also, I discovered that my (hand) quilting stitches tend to look more even on the front than the back. All this is possibly why most people don't do this... .

Generally speaking, however, I liked the patchwork design and might use it again in my next, bigger, quilt for Granddaughter the Eldest. (I keep thinking that I should try triangles but keep not doing so.)

 Anyway, the baby! So lovely!

She met her biggest cousin, who was surprisingly excited about it considering that he already had two little girl cousins: Granddaughter the Younger and a cousin on his dad's side. He does think that the next baby - due in a few weeks to his dad's brother and sister-in-law - should be a boy, though. Well, there's a 50/50 chance.

Son, Daughter-in-Law and Granddaughter the Younger came down too, as did Mr Life's cousin. This was lovely, though Granddaughter the Younger was possibly less impressed by the baby than the rest of us were. In fact she was extremely unimpressed when her mum and dad cuddled Granddaughter the Youngest!

I like this picture: a family scene.

And here's G the Y inspecting with apparent astonishment her Auntie Daughter 1.

It was so wonderful to see them all together. I hope they grow up to like one another - I know cousins aren't always close. I myself have no cousins and always wanted some. I've always been glad that our children get on well with their only two cousins, though they don't see all that much of them because of distance.

Sunshine

On Saturday we went with our walking friends to Cramond,

and walked along the river bank to Cammo, round the Cammo estate,

and back again. We're lucky to have so many apparently rural places within the city boundaries.

Then yesterday we walked along to the Modern Art Gallery and saw a wonderful exhibition of British Realist Painting. Beautiful pictures, some by names I didn't know at all. There was one by James McIntosh Partick that I would have happily stolen, of the view out of his Dundee window on to sunlit bare trees in the gardens and his wife hanging out the washing - it's just lovely, what with the traceries of the branches and twigs and the bright washing. (I doubt if the clothes would have dried, though, since it was clearly winter.)
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/true-life-british-realist-painting-1920s-and-1930s


And then we walked home again, past the Landform (above)

and along the Water of Leith.

There was no wind to disturb the reflections on the water.

It's getting quite autumnal but there's still quite a lot of colour in the garden: sedum,

 
Japanese anemones,

more Japanese anemones and montbretia (the yellow variety since I don't like orange)

 
and autumn crocuses.

The other grandparents are up visiting. We were invited to lunch (great apple pie, other grandmother!). Here's Grandson doing one of his absolutely characteristic activities

 

and Granddaughter-the-Elder, the bookworm, in her new slippers.

Cats can't use apostrophes.

My mention of the apostrophe got quite a few comments. Ironically, of course, my teaching colleagues and I are the ones who seem to have allowed the younger generations to grow up grammarless, so perhaps I should be hanging my head in shame instead of making rueful remarks. (The essays I was marking weren’t written by my own students, I’d like to add – though probably my students produced work of much the same standard.)

When I started teaching in a comprehensive (high) school, in 1973, grammar was out. Or so it was said. But I don’t know any of my colleagues who didn’t try their best to teach it. What is probably true was that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as when we were at school: one period a week for thirteen years or so. The real problem as we secondary teachers saw it – and this may not have been true – was that primary teachers no longer taught it. Certainly we found that our first year pupils knew very little about grammar, and so we were building on very shaky foundations indeed.

Received wisdom from the teaching theorists was that creativity was more important and that we shouldn’t limit our pupils’ imaginations by banging on about spelling and such. But I’ve always corrected spelling, taught grammar and discussed sentence structure and fluency.

I have some ideas about why the standard of written English seems to be so bad now. One centres on the fact that some young people don’t read much for pleasure. The theory goes that if you read good English then you’ll absorb it. (Or is it just that people who read a lot are also those who like language and therefore tend to write carefully?) These non-reading young people are now being expected to stay on at school, do academic exams and take up jobs that require a certain amount of writing. Before, they might have left school at fourteen and taken up apprenticeships and no one would really have noticed their writing abilities.

At the same time, of course, there were many highly literate people who had to leave school early for financial reasons, which meant that though they worked in blue collar jobs, their skills in English were impressive. Now it's the less academic children, on the whole, who tend to go on to these jobs.

For another thing, yes, pupils may do less grammar and less writing in general; but they have other skills. They learn IT and go on outings and do projects. Time is finite and primary teachers can’t do everything. Meanwhile, in secondary schools and colleges of further education, we have to administer lots of assessments, so that at some points in the term we’re spending more time assessing than teaching.

And then there are computers that do your thinking for you, and text messages…

I was greatly comforted some years ago to read a book of letters written home by soldiers in the First World War. They were full of errors of grammar, spelling and expression. I blame the teachers.

Meanwhile, Spring is beginning to return to my garden. Thank goodness.