Still here

Hello there! Remember me? I used to blog here. Sometimes I wrote several times a week. I'm not sure I remember that to be honest. I'm not sure I remember the feeling of having the energy to write that often, or of having enough to say. I barely have enough to say to maintain a conversation with BigBear, let alone write something that might even raise a wry smile with the rest of you. We all know how it goes now, you talk to a friend on Zoom and try as you might, you just end up bleating about boredom, stress, homeschooling, whose spouse does the most/least around the house, government ineptitude, vaccinations or whichever other permutation of lockdown happens to be at the forefront of your mind. It's not as though we've all got lots of interesting films, concerts, holidays or adventures to tell each other about, is it?

So, to save time, here's a Generic Blog Post that you can pop in and read whenever you're wondering what the Bear Family is up to.

BigBear is coding, with the exact location of where he is currently to be found in the house being determined from a complex algorithm based upon the temperature of his feet, the angle of the sun through the windows, the noise from the homeschooling department, and how persistently IdiotCat is pestering him.

LittleBear is squirming in his chair, running the nails of his left hand back and forth across the fabric of the seat to make a rythmic rasping noise as he listens to a message from his class teacher. A rasp that begins to file through the fabric of your mind after approximately five and a quarter seconds. It's History first thing, to get the pain out of the way early in the day, and the entire lesson is punctuated by complaints of "I can't do this, it's too hard." Particularly as it involves drawing a picture. Why? Why must they have to draw so many pictures? LittleBear is not a child who wishes to express himself through the medium of narrative collage. After forty-seven hours on the history picture, it turns out there's another task. By this point, even I'm not sure I can face more History. It involves expressing an opinion. Asking LittleBear his opinion on anything other than football or Minecraft is akin to asking a cactus whether it wants porridge for breakfast. I think the cactus would answer quicker. LittleBear certainly doesn't have, or wish to be asked to express, opinions on the religious beliefs of Vikings and the impact these had on their life choices.

Having completed his History, and had an interstitial penalty shoot-out with Mummy, he moves on to Maths, as a relaxing treat. LittleBear is genuinely very good at Maths. And Maths is LittleBear's favourite subject. Except when his teacher asks him what his favourite work from last week is, and suddenly it's RE. The RE that he has been known to ask why they study. The RE that caused him to sob and wail about the injustices of life, not to mention the iniquities of being asked to draw a picture. (Again, why? Why always the pictures?) The Maths however, will be awesome, and LittleBear is amazing, and brilliant, and Mummy must come and see how brilliant he is. Until he makes a mistake, and then he's an idiot, and the stupidest child in the world, and he's never doing another Maths question ever again, and he's going back to bed. It's a real rollercoaster in Maths lessons round here.

Having recovered from the Maths, and forgotten that the History even happened, and had another penalty shoot-out with Mummy, it's lunch-time. A chance to wonder which permutation of bread and cheese we're having today. Or to quote one of my colleagues, "I'm bored of bread and cheese, I think I'll have pizza today..."

English after lunch. Though only after some more penalties. It's important LittleBear keeps proving his superiority over his mother. LittleBear starts the English lesson video, but the volume on this particular video is strangely loud, and Mummy can't really think straight when someone's yelling about fronted adverbials. And then LittleBear starts bleating because he's going to have to write an entire paragraph. The horror. Mummy goes to assist, but the desk is a bomb-site with pens and paper everywhere after the History-or-is-it-Art lesson. Vexed by noise, Mummy tries to clear up, but the colouring pens fall down the back of the desk. So Mummy yells at the pens. And at the computer, which is shouting back about prepositional clauses, and at LittleBear who is sitting looking bewildered. Then the books that were teetering in a heap, biggest book on top, slump sideways across the desk, knocking the pen pot over and Mummy picks up the biggest book and hurls it on the floor in a rage.

Then LittleBear is crying, and Mummy is crying and someone is still banging on about time connectives and powerful adjectives. Eventually English is paused, and Mummy and LittleBear are cuddling in a chair, and we're all sorry, and we eat chocolate together until we feel better. It's never too early to teach a child that eating chocolate is a useful emotional crutch is it?

Eventually, English is resumed at a lower volume, and LittleBear only requires "someone in your household" to discuss things with three times in an eleven minute video. And then another twenty-five minutes of help planning before he can tackle the forty minutes of writing it takes him to complete the twenty minute task. 

But in that forty minutes, only interrupted twice by complaints of, "my hand is too tired to write," and a few penalties to limber up again, Mummy has a chance to discover that she made a mistake in her own work right back at the start of the History lesson, and that all the subsequent work done today is based on one error and will therefore have to be thrown away. Because Mummy is also working from home, and it's going swimmingly. Just as Mummy begins to get into the zone of sorting out the design monstrosity she's unleashed, the English is finished, the school day is over and it's time to play with LittleBear.

Which I do. Because I love him to the moon and back, and I'm a shit teacher, but I can at least try not to also be a shit mother once school is over for the day. I don't always succeed, but at least I'm trying, which is all any of us can ever really say. 

And even though most of the above is mostly true, it's not always all of that all of the time. In fact, compared to many, LittleBear is an angel, and works hard, and tries his best. And the school have done an outstanding job of providing video lessons and it is infinitely easier to get LittleBear to do the work when he has to submit it to his teacher and there's the tantalising prospect of a star in return, compared to the soul-destroying trudge last year of working and working and the only people who saw the work were his parents. And BigBear takes charge of French and Art, and anything else we decide he'll enjoy, and he sorts out the day's Variation On Bread And Cheese. And he gets his share of penalty shoot-outs as well. So we're doing as well as anyone. But I don't have anything else to write about.

A theory of evolution

I am not addressing here any consideration of Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 

No, I'm talking here about a mysterious process that occurs when you have lived in a house for a certain length of time. I do not know exactly what that length of time is, but I think there's scope for several doctoral theses on the subject. Something happens, after you have accreted enough stuff in your house, such that new things begin to appear. Things that you have no recollection of begging, borrowing, stealing, buying or being given. And yet there they are, lurking in dark corners, at the backs of cupboards, hiding under the stairs. They are furtive, knowing that once found they may no longer have a welcome home. Have they invaded? Or have they simply evolved from fluff and malice? I suspect the latter.

What other explanation can there be for the fact that I have just found, at the back of the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, an unopened packet of prunes from a supermarket 200 miles from here with a best before date of 17th December 2011? I have never knowingly wanted a prune. I have never knowingly purchased a prune. And yet, here they are, squatting malevolently in my cupboard.

The only possible explanation is that they have evolved. Perhaps from the thirteen assorted, opened-then-forgotten packets of raisins, sultanas and currants. Or from fluff and malice.

Weight Loss Plan That Really Works!!!

 A few weeks ago, BigBear decided that perhaps he needed to be NotQuiteSoBigBear, and has been cutting back on his food and drink intake. He is doing very well, despite his wife's insistence on sitting next to him eating hot buttered toast and drinking red wine.

I, however, have been stoically refusing to acknowledge that the overhang above my waistband is a new feature, and I have certainly been refusing to stand on the bathroom scales. This morning, that resolve cracked, and I discovered that I now weigh more than I have done at any time other than when pregnant. And I'm not pregnant.

I'll tell you a little something about myself, and I think it's something that will resonate with quite a few people... I comfort eat. I eat when I'm tired. I eat when I'm stressed. I eat when I'm unhappy. All three of those states have featured this year, in abundance. And as we approach Christmas, and I attempt to undertake too much, make too much, prepare too much and be too much, all of those states ramp up to maximum. 

In light of which, and with an astonishing surfeit of self-awareness, I have decided on a new weight loss plan. And I can 100% guarantee that it really, really works. You don't have to count calories, you don't have to feel hungry, you don't have to stop drinking. My plan? My plan is to not give a damn about being slightly heavier than I used to be. Not now. Not yet. Yes, I could do with shedding a bit of weight. No, I don't fit into my glam party clothes. Was I going to any glam parties? I was not. I am just going to carry on as I am, for now. I'm going to accept that I'm not as fit or healthy as I could be, for now. I'm going to accept that this has been an incredibly stressful, tiring, distressing year, and I'm going to celebrate the fact that we, and all our loved ones, are reaching the end of it with our health intact, with roofs over our heads and food on our tables makes us a damn sight luckier than many.

I am going to eat, drink and try to be merry, and maybe in 2021 I'll be able to do less of the first two, and more of the third.

Sciencing my way through the day

Every industry has a "thing", I'm sure of it. One of those pieces of lore passed on from generation unto generation about The Way Things Are Done. Often there's a good reason behind The Way, but equally often, nobody in living memory has ever witnessed that good reason in action. Probably because everyone follows The Way Things Are Done and so doesn't have to re-visit the pain of why doing it a different way is wrong.

In my industry, of ultra-high vacuum engineering, that thing is brass. Brass, for the non-metallurgically wise, is an alloy of copper and zinc, and "everyone" knows that you must never, ever use brass in an ultra-high vacuum system. Weird things happen. Namely, the zinc migrates out of the alloy and evaporates, leaving copper behind, and coating everything inside your vacuum system with a very thin coating of zinc oxide. At this point, I shall simply assure you that a thin coating of zinc oxide is a Very Bad Thing. 

I have worked on ultra-high vacuum systems for twenty-two years, and I have never seen this happen. My colleagues have, between them, some 180-odd years of experience in ultra-high vacuum system. None of them has ever seen this happen. Obviously, we've all been good and avoided putting brass components in our systems.

I have spent the past couple of weeks banging my head against a brick wall of intransigent scientific instrument, at the heart of which is an ultra-high vacuum chamber. Nothing about it made sense, and eventually, in a cascade of exploding electronics, it finally gave up functioning completely last Friday afternoon. So yesterday I pulled it apart, and found a curious grey deposit all over sections of it. Usually when we find Nasty Things, they turn out to be hydrocarbons, and can be dissolved in alcohol or hexane. This stuff didn't want to dissolve that way.

We all stared, poked and prodded the contaminated surfaces. It was like nothing we'd seen before, and it was everywhere. Normally, we consider a faint smudge or spec of dust to be contamination. Things that are not visible to the eye can be bad enough to stop our instruments working properly. We handle everything with surgical gloves. None of us were prepared for this level of crap. My son comes home from school looking cleaner than this thing.

We looked forlornly at each other, at the floor, and at the ceiling, hoping for inspiration. We drank cups of tea. And then I looked more closely. And I noticed something odd about some of the connectors right in the heart of the machine. Little gold-coloured connectors, that were no longer gold-coloured, but a beautiful salmon-pink. Almost as though they were now made of copper.

(With the benefit of hindsight, and my little mention of brass, I'm hoping you can all see where this is going...)

A spot of hunting around, measuring, comparing, and a growing sense of horror, I realised that the connectors had been taken from the wrong packet. They were brass, and supposed only ever to be used in building electronics, and never in a vacuum system. And still my colleagues couldn't quite believe that such a tiny connector could create so much stuff everywhere. Still, there were dissenting voices asserting it must, somehow, be copper oxide, or iron oxide that we were seeing, and not zinc oxide. So out came The Rubber Bible and we were able to determine that there was a simple test - if our gunk dissolved in sodium hydroxide, it was zinc oxide, and if it didn't it was copper oxide or iron oxide.* 

Friends, the oxide dissolved in sodium hydroxide.

We actually managed to do that thing that everyone knows you shouldn't do. We evaporated zinc out of brass to leave pure copper, and coated every internal part of a beautiful mass spectrometer with zine oxide. (A beautiful mass spectrometer that was supposed to be winging its way to its customer at the end of next week, which is a teensy weensy issue now). But the thing is, despite the fact that it's all totally buggered, I'm so much happier than I've been in weeks, because I know why it's buggered. I have found a simple, elegant explanation for every problem this machine has had. I have used a simple, elegant chemical test that demonstrated that my hypothesis was correct. And I got to use The Rubber Bible.

Today, I scienced. And it was good.

* This would get very long and tedious if I went into all the details of why we knew it was an oxide, and why it was limited to those three materials. You're just going to have to believe me.

You don't have to be the best (Part II)

Before anyone panics, I'm (moderately) certain that this is only going to be a two-part series. This episode is about my lovely boy, and my attempts to manage his hopes and expectations so that he doesn't follow the same contorted mental path that I have, and accepts that doing things for fun is OK, being average at things is OK, and enjoying his life is more important than winning. Nothing like setting myself a nice easy goal.

There have been Things Afoot in the life of LittleBear this year that I haven't written about here, partly for fear of jinxing things, and partly for fear of turning into one of those parents who casually drops into conversation how Tarquin passed his grade 8 Euphonium exams when he was seven*.

As assiduous readers will have noticed, LittleBear loves football. He plays football at every opportunity, he watches football at every opportunity, he can remember (in mind-numbingly tedious detail) the events of matches lost in the mists of time to normal mortals. So, in the brief, golden window of less-lockdown during the summer holidays, he attended a football summer club for a week. And at the end of the week, not only did he receive a trophy for being "Player of the Week", we also received an email telling us that he'd been identified as having "strong attributes" and would be invited for a five week trial with the Norwich City FC regional development program.

And thus followed five very cold, very wet, very windy Friday evenings spent in the middle of the fens, watching my gorgeous little boy training with a group of very talented other little boys (including, fantastically, two of his team mates from our team). I loved the experience of being able to just watch him train and play, and not being responsible for eleven little boys' boot laces and bumped heads, and social distancing, not to mention actually trying to keep them focussed on the training exercise in progress. And I loved watching a really, really good coach at work. It was genuinely inspirational to see how he kept the boys attention, kept them working hard, didn't suffer any nonsense, and yet still allowed them enough of a free rein that they were having fun and laughing.

But, enough about me, back to LittleBear. After a nervous wait, during which it turned out Norwich City FC mis-typed my email address and therefore didn't send us the all-important invitation, my little boy has been asked to join their Player Development Centre. I am absolutely over the moon for him, but it has now opened a huge can of worms for us. Because football clubs are ruthless. They have no loyalty, they have only the desire to be the best and coach the best. And year on year, they assess who "the best" are, from their existing children and any others they scout, and they "let go" the ones who don't make the cut. Some day, LittleBear will be "let go". It could be after one year, two years, five years or ten. But it will happen, and we need to prepare him for that, and for the fact that it doesn't matter. Because he isn't Lionel Messi, and he never will be, but that's OK. He doesn't have to be the best, he just needs to be himself, and he can love football and play football and have a brilliant time no matter what level he reaches.

Which is how we generated our Football Hierarchy - people who live, breathe and love football, but have stopped at different steps along the playing scale:

Coach A: plays grassroots football, coaches grassroots football, loves the game passionately but never played anywhere above grassroots.

Coach W: coaches grassroots football and in his younger days played for a non-league side. Genuinely talented, loves the game but never came close to a professional career in it.

Junior Brown: plays for Scunthorpe, has had a successful but not stellar career pootling up and down the lower reaches of the English league system. Outside the clubs he's played for, has anyone heard of him?

PE teacher: former professional footballer for a second-tier club, former football manager, now LittleBear's PE teacher. A man who made a career out of football at a fairly high level, but probably hasn't been heard of by most of the country.

James Tarkowski: a stalwart of the Burnley Premiership team, with two international caps to his name, but still hardly a household name.

Marcus Rashford: Man United superstar, England superstar, champion of children, and man everyone (in the UK) has heard of.

Lionel Messi: there's only one Lionel Messi.

Each one of them reached a point where they knew they were not going to be Lionel Messi (except Lionel Messi, don't be pedantic). But each one of them kept playing, kept enjoying the game. Each one of them will have been "let go" at some point in their playing life, and each one of them will have carried on anyway, playing and training and enjoying the game without being Lionel Messi. The end of one path isn't the end of everything. And for every player who reached even the modest heights of Scunthorpe United, a thousand children didn't. And most of those thousands of children who love football will never rise above the lowest rung in our Football Hierarchy, but they will still play football and love it.

So this is the conversation we've been having with LittleBear, and he has helped craft the Football Hierarchy, in an attempt to make sure he sees and feels and knows the value of playing football just for fun. An attempt to help him see the huge numbers of people who play and love football without it being a career. And while it's brilliant to have been invited to join a big club's youth development scheme, at some point that will end, and it won't be a reflection on him, and it won't change how much we love him or how proud we are of him. And nobody becomes Lionel Messi.

Meanwhile, I'm still super happy for my little Claret and Blue Canary**.

Someone at NCFC will probably be quite cross about this

* Note: LittleBear's name is not Tarquin, and he does not play the Euphonium.

** For those who don't pay eagle-eyed attention to English football, The Bear family's beloved Burnley play in claret and blue, while Norwich City FC are nicknamed the Canaries, with said bird on their crest.

You don't have to be the best (Part I)

About a week ago, while meandering aimlessly through posts on Facebook, I stumbled across a Kurt Vonnegut quote that a friend had posted, and it really hit a chord with me. (I often find myself mildly exasperated by "inspirational" quotes on the internet, and positively filled with rage at some of the utter tripe that's ascribed to Winnie-the-Pooh but which was absolutely not crafted by A A Milne. I'm assuming they're Disney quotes, or just random bollocks that someone on the internet made up, but I find them irksome.)

Anyway, back to Vonnegut. I was so taken with this particular piece that I even spent some time hunting around for references to it, to try and be as certain as possible that it wasn't a Winnie-the-Pooh-ism. And I was pretty satisfied that it was the real thing.  And the thing is, I have been going back to it several times a day, reading and re-reading it. Marvelling at what a radically different world view it presents to me, and wishing, perhaps, that I had had this particular epiphany several decades ago.

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.” 

 

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

 

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

 - Kurt Vonnegut

Pretty* obvious isn't it? It's great to do things just for fun, because you like them, because they make you smile, just because. You don't have to be the best, you don't have to "win", you just have to do it and you'll be a richer, more rounded, more interesting person. But that's not really me. While I certainly can't lay claim to the level of talent that Mr Vonnegut has, I can definitely relate to the "achievement-oriented environment". I need to be good at everything I do, I need to excel, I need to prove myself. And it's absolutely exhausting. Not to mention the fact that there are lots of things I don't do, because I'm a bit rubbish at them. Or maybe just average. I avoid huge swathes of life's opportunities for fear of failing, or of not being the best at it. 

In a moment of synchronicity, today I found my original diagnosis of anxiety and depression and the accompanying recommendations made by the psychologist to my GP. Illuminating excerpts include:

"PhysicsBear worries that she is not good enough, despite the evidence going against this, and engages in anxious predictions... PhysicsBear has unrelenting standards which are exacerbating her beliefs... she fears that she will get something wrong and as a result of this she oscillates between over-preparing and avoiding..."

And one of the therapy goals that was identified in 2013 was:

"Not to be as concerned that she is failing if she is not perfect."

So really, seven years later, I shouldn't find Kurt Vonnegut's words such a revelation. But here I am anyway, trying to accept that just doing stuff for fun is OK. I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be better than other people. Me is enough. Doing is enough. 

So if you hear an off-key warble, aimlessly meandering from note to note, not quite holding a tune, it's just me singing. Because I'm crap at it, but it makes me happy. And if it doesn't actually cause anyone physical pain (which may be debatable) then perhaps I should give myself permission just to do one thing really badly, if it makes me happy.

* At this point in my writing, IdiotCat walked across the keyboard and wrote "hjukkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk,55555". Tempting though it was to leave his words for posterity, I felt it detracted from the readability.

Age is just a number

But sometimes it seems like a dauntingly big number.

Take 9 for example.

My little baby is 9 years old today. Half way to being allowed to vote. Potentially half way to moving away from home.

It's a terrifying thought, especially as I look around and see my cousins' children attending university, setting off on gap years, launching themselves into their adult lives when it barely seems moments ago that they too were round-cheeked little moppets, earnestly explaining their imaginary worlds to me.

A month ago we knew what we were doing for LittleBear's birthday - today would have been a football match against the toughest team in his league, and tomorrow would have been a friendly football match arranged amongst players only from our own club as a substitute for a party. Parties were banned in covid-land, but football matches weren't, and since there's nothing a Bear loves more than playing football with his friends, I was making use of one of the only perks of being a football coach and arranging a match for him.

But here we are, back under lockdown, where not only parties are verboten, but so are football matches. Unless you're being paid millions of pounds and then you can still play football, because covid recognises pay cheques.

It was not, therefore, quite the birthday he had dreamed of, or we had planned, but (I hope) it was still a fun one. And what was perhaps most striking was just how many good friends my little boy has. Friends who walked, drove, or cycled round to our house in the pouring rain to deliver cards or presents. Friends who called by video, or sent emails. Even a friend who came out and played football in the park in the rain*. I think, and slightly hope, that LittleBear takes it all in his stride that he has such good friends rather than being surprised by it. But I was genuinely touched by the consideration, kindness and love from his friends and their parents that helped make his birthday a day filled with surprises and happiness.

There are many things in the world that are dark and miserable at the moment, including today's weather. And yet today was filled with all that was good about the people in the small corner of the world we occupy. And cake.

A successful birthday present

* LittleBear and LittleFriend will never let rain come between them and football. And to keep within the covid-rules, they met up on their own as "two individuals from different household exercising together" while I ran and walked round and round the park. In the rain.