Back to school – part 1

(written offline, Wednesday 3rd Sept)

Tuesday 2nd September dawned miserable and rainy. Not quite as perfect a start to the new school year as you would hope, given that nobody in this house is going to school in the car these days.

Isaac’s school is a five minute walk just around the corner - not even worth getting in the car for - when it rains the closest you can park to the school is our house!

Beth will be cycling – except for the first few days I’ll be going with her until she’s confident that she knows the way there and back. I of course have to pedal a strategic distance away from her, and hang back an unembarassing few yards from the school gate at the end of the day.

By 9.15 on that first day there were two parents back at home wondering what to do next. You see, I left work 14 weeks ago, and since then I’ve either been busy fixing and decorating a house or getting ready to move out of it or unloading it this end, and Tasha has been working and doing similar preparatory work. Now that we’ve got all that done there’s a slight “what do we do now” atmosphere until I start college.

We drank a bit of tea, and Tasha wore one of those horrible ‘I hope my babies are alright at school’ expressions for the following 6 hours.

So I made a proper start on my reading list. The boundaries of it are a bit fuzzy – i.e. ‘make sure you are familiar with the broad outline of the whole Bible, and the main contents of the New Testament’. But the specifics are that I have to:
· Read a 900 page novelisation of the Bible (‘The Book of God’ by Walter Wangerin – a brilliant way of effectively skim reading the whole thing). I've been attacking this at 30 pages a day for the last fortnight and I'm halfway through already.
· Read “How to read the Bible for all its worth” – another book teaching me to do what it says on the can. However, having made a start on this it’s not just a case of reading 13 chapters and filing the book away. For the first time in my life I’m actually looking up all the references and making notes as I go along, so it’s a slow old process. Especially when one of those references is the whole book of 1 Corinthians, 15 chapters itself. That put me behind a little on my planned progress for the first session...
· Read each gospel in a single sitting. I hope that means 4 sittings!
· Make my way through six chapters of ‘Learn New Testament Greek’. Even with the accompanying CD this is a tricky matter. I’m a scientist, not a linguist and I really could do with more than a disembodied voice to help me through those early chapters. I’m hoping that the promised pre-term starter course materialises. The only slight advantage I might have is that electronics and maths uses most of the Greek alphabet in equations. I’ve never put them together in words and sentences though peeps.

So having planned all that out on a piece of paper, I now have a feeling that it might just be possible to wade my way through all that in the next 26 days before college starts (notice that I’m counting in days not weeks or months now!). I’m not sure how those people who will be working right until a few days before starting college will find time to do this.

At the end of the school day both new students returned home, and both had had a good day. In a surprising turn of events Beth had made 5 friends and Isaac none yet (although he had talked to a lot of people in class he hadn’t found anybody to play with at break times). We were expecting it to be the other way round. By the following day he had made two friends - Matthew and Raven (yes, that's his real name!) and had been to Sainsburys to buy a class cactus which is called Johnny Depp.

And in other news, the shed doors arrived several days after the shed and our broadband modem appeared today (but isn't yet activated).