George Dawes

I know this is old now - by at least two months, so in the internet age... a lifetime - but its just brilliant. I stumbled on it again recently.

Crackly woods

A nature reserve/woods with a 2 km pushchair friendly path round the edge, perfect for a stroll and lots of jumping in muddy puddles and climbing trees.

The boys

Murder

This was ages ago now but I've been a little off the blogging pace recently. Naomi's birthday was a murder mystery dinner party. Happily, and much to his annoyance, I was able to wear alex's normal clothes as a costume. Even more happily I'm not in this picture.

Half term track construction

Gaffer, cut up juice cartons and some plastic track. Nice.

Complaint letters

I always think I should write them, but I never get round to it. I do compose them in my head though: Dear Sir, Imagine my horror when...

The problem is now I can't ever write any, because they won't be as good as this one: http://tinyurl.com/azxndo

Canal repairs

Very geeky this, we went for a walk along hatton locks today and they had drained a short section of canal in between two locks for repairs. So this is what a canal looks like with no water in it (the small stream in the middle is leakage from the top lock gates).












Interesting to see the guts of a lock after many holidays spent sailing over them.

Frank Turner

Frank Turner is great. Just downloaded the new album (bit slow here - its been out for ages) "Love Ire & song".
Highly recommended, lovely feel and unusually high production values for a low distribution album. But as usual mostly just great lyrics...
"Surely one day, we can fight and we can win. And if only for a little while, we could insist on the impossible"
But less of the serious stuff and more of the random...
"well we've been a few hours drinking, so I'm going to say what everyones thinking, if we are stuck on this ship and its sinking, then we might as well have a parade"

Genius.

Breakout space

Nice seating. Early version of intelegent display/wallpaper.

CPD

Unsuprisingly there is a big feeling that innovative schools have excellent CPD programmes. I've picked up a few ideas for radicalizing ours, will thrash them out with julie on my return.