“We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”
– David Attenborough
Every so often, there’s a moment that makes you realise that nature likes to reuse good designs wherever possible. I don’t know if it’s just me, but this fungus looks awfully like a sponge … one of those natural ones that seem to be growing if you leave them on the edge of the bath.
Now, I have a bit of a confession here; I’m not entirely sure what this is. I mean, I know it’s not a sponge, that bit I am pretty certain of. But when it comes to putting a name to it, I’m a little bit stumped. I think it might be a Thelephora palmata. That’s what Google is telling me, and based on (some of) the photos I can find, it looks about right. Of course, some of the photos labelled with this species name look like a completely different species, but I guess that’s only to be expected when you use the internet!
The common name for this species is the Stinking Earthfan or Fetid False Coral. Given the particular epithets used in these names, it should come as no surprise that this fungus has a strong, garlic aroma. I’d love to tell you that I noticed this smell, but if I’m honest, I really didn’t. Irritatingly, my sense of smell, which used to be really sensitive, has never been the same since I caught Covid a few years ago. On the other hand, the more I read the descriptions of the smell, the more I might be quite glad I couldn’t smell it.
If I’ve got the species right, this is likely to be a young specimen as the tips were coated in white powder, whereas the rest of the mushroom were a greyish-purple.
I found it in an area of coniferous woodland to the West of Grimes Graves on my Saturday wander. I’d followed the route that has been marked out for an upcoming bike event in the forest but then branched off when it started heading too far away from where I wanted to be. The books and websites all say that this is associated with coniferous areas, often close to birch trees (which were also not far away from where I found this), but there are very few confirmed sightings in the UK and the closest one is way over towards Stanton. The photos make this look surprisingly like Candlesnuff Fungus, but it was much softer and had a more pinkish/lilac tinge in real life.
If by some miracle someone well informed sees this post and has some input, I’d be very grateful to receive it.
“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
– Andy Warhol
It’s at about this time of year that I start questioning my life choices. It happens every year, and I know I’m not alone. Why on earth did I choose to work in education? What possessed me to teach English? And why, oh why, did I end up working for a multi academy trust?
We’ve had two months of GCSEs with all the attendant stress (ours, not the students), followed by two weeks of Year 10 exams (more stress) and two weeks of KS3 summative assessments (even more stress). All of which have to be marked. Year 10 by today, KS3 by next Wednesday. That’s ten classes worth of marking, and I teach English, so all of it involves reading essays and making subjective judgements. None of this right/wrong stuff for us!! We’ve had two Parents’ Evenings since half term and one evening of Trust CPD. Last week was Year 11 Leavers week, fancy dress, final assemblies, et al. Friday evening was the Year 11 prom. This week is Activities Week, where there are no lessons, half the school is out on trips, and the other half is doing ‘fun’ activities in school (fun for them, perhaps, but not for the staff who have to supervise). Monday is Sports Day, which somehow involves all members of staff being outside in the heatwave all day (I’m just waiting for that migraine to hit). Oh, and all our reports are due to be completed. By next Wednesday.
So this is my reminder to myself of my answers. This is why I made these life choices. This is why do it. And I love it. No, really, I do. Honest.
Keira appears next to my desk suddenly, friend in tow, and an anxious look on her face.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Of course I agree, and she nervously asks me to confirm whether it’s OK that she answered the question on ‘A Christmas Carol’ using one quote from the extract and the other four from her own knowledge. I tell her it is, and she goes on to tell me that she wrote five paragraphs for each question. The points she goes on to tell me about seem positive, and she leaves with a huge smile on her face.
I haven’t looked at her paper yet, but that smile, and the confidence from which it stems, are priceless.
As I’m rushing down the corridor clutching piles of photocopying, I see Ella waiting outside my room.
“How’s it going?” I enquire, worrying that she’s panicking about today’s upcoming assessment. Her attendance is not great, and we’ve already talked about the fact that she might struggle because she’s missed so much school.
She softly tells me that everything’s fine and that she has a present for me. She rummages in her bag and hands me a pair of earrings, from the bottom of which dangle two small, pink plastic ducks.
I love them.
Charlie stomps through the door at lunchtime and demands to know whether I know what Cat’s Cradle is. She has one set up on her hands, so I take hold of the string at the intersection, pull it up, out, underneath and through.
She looks slightly appeased by my knowledge, looks at me askance, and exclaims, “Why does NO ONE (apart from you and Mrs C) know about it?”
I have no answer for her.
We happily play Cat’s Cradle for a good five minutes before we get stuck in a recurring loop and fail to find a way out.
Betsy and Gabby come in at break time and very carefully plan an essay on the board to answer the (distinctly random) question, “Why does Shakespeare love fruit?”*
It may be a random question, but they expertly build a paragraph involving pears, Snoop Dogg, and an analysis of the word love. It may not be a particularly creditable argument, but the way they construct their paragraph, carefully following the guidelines we’ve talked about in so many lessons, makes me very proud.
I’m keeping everything crossed that I get to keep them for their GCSE studies. We’ve come so far over the last two years.
*I have no clue where their ideas come from. I occasionally tell them to think outside the box … I may need to specify how far outside the box we’re aiming.
As I’m walking through Reception, somewhere between putting the kettle on, making coffee, collecting my printing, and starting my marking, I see Grace with her Head of Key Stage.
“Morning, lovely. How’s it going?”
“Good, thanks, miss. You? “
Suddenly, I have a terrible thought. The English Language mock started ten minutes ago, and she is patently not in it. She’s been having a bit of a wobble based on lack of confidence this week and has fallen back into old habits, refusing to go into exams and wandering instead. I’ve rounded her up on a couple of occasions and got her to where she’s meant to be.
I stop dead in my tracks, reverse, and give her ‘the face’. She gives me a cheeky grin, “Don’t worry, miss. I’m going, I was just sorting something out. I’m quite excited for this one!” and off she goes.
I’m left in Reception, trying to reconcile the stroppy teen of September with this new model. Is this a parallel universe, or did Grace just tell me she was excited for an English exam?
I’ve got my head in my hands, ploughing through the endless hell that is ‘No More Marking’* when Tabitha wanders through my door. I’m only half listening when she starts telling me about her fears for the residential trip she’s going on next week.
*I have some issues with this piece of software; namely that it is the most poorly named, idiotic, ridiculous piece of software I’ve ever had the misfortune to be forced to use! Instead of reading and marking 32 scripts, I somehow have to read and assess 308 scripts from across the Trust. No More ….. nevermind!
By the time she’s finished a couple of sentences, I’m paying full attention. Crying with laughter, but absolutely paying full attention. Her fears go as follows:
They have to build rafts in ‘dead fish water’
She might stand on a dead fish.
She might fall in and get stuck under the raft.
There might be a spider in the tent.
There might be a deer in the tent.
There might be a toad in the tent.
The toad might jump on to her face.
Before you get cross with me for laughing, please let me assure you that their destination is a watersports lake, and the level of dead fishery is reasonably low, because of this, the chance of her standing on a dead fish is also very low, the lake is shallow and they will be wearing life jackets, deer tend to avoid human tents and toads tend to avoid humans in general. There is a good chance that there may be a spider in the tent, but this is Britain, and spiders pose no actual danger to human life¤.
¤ I can’t, however, say the same for human dignity, but Tabitha does remarkably well with spiders; she rescued me from one the other morning, so i think she’ll be fine.
I might have been a little less unsympathetic if she hadn’t been the daughter of a friend, and I didn’t know without a shadow of a doubt that she’s been camping regularly since she was a small child and is entirely capable of dealing with most of these things. I mean, a toad climbing on your face would be terrifying, but, and it’s a big but, it seems very unlikely to actually happen.
I headed out to briefing, having completed virtually no marking, still giggling, but with a promise that if a toad landed on anyone’s face, I would get photographic evidence.
I sometimes feel that I don’t make life easy for myself. Why, oh why, would I decide to become obsessed with bees of all things? I mean, even the identification guides think they’re difficult to identify.
This little bee briefly visited the sea of Forget-Me-Nots that lives at the bottom of my garden. And when I say ‘briefly’, I mean these are the only two photos that I managed in the five seconds I was graced with its presence. I went into this happily, though, heading back to the house, armed with my photos, and a whole heap of confidence. Spoiler alert: this confidence was somewhat misplaced.
“It has a bright, fox-orange thorax and a shiny black abdomen. There’s a white blob on the side of the abdomen, and it has bright yellow, very hairy hind legs. How difficult can it be to identify?” I foolishly thought …..
Two insect identification books and a dozen Google searches later, I have come to four conclusions:
Bees are really difficult to identify.
This is definitely a bee.
It is, therefore, incredibly difficult to identify*.
It also might (very, very tentatively) be the Grey-Patched Mining Bee, Andrena nitida.
* See my logical deduction there … I’m quite proud of myself.
The blue flowers? Them I’m confident about … they are absolutely, definitely, 100% Forget-Me-Nots (Myosotis sylvatica). These glorious flowers have the same hue as a summer sky and proliferate in drifts wherever they’re allowed to. One of the coolest things about them is that the centre ring starts off bright yellow and then fades to white once it has been pollinated, letting all the pollinators know that there is no more nectar available. You can see the proof of this in the final photograph.
Enjoy! I’m going for a sit-down and an internet search to find a new interest. Camels, maybe; counting humps can’t be that difficult. On the other hand, they don’t exactly run wild in the Norfolk countryside. Hmmmmm …
“I‘m up here most o’ the time anyway, because I’m studying to become a gonnagle.” The young Feegle flourished a set of mousepipes. “An’ they willnae let me play doon there on acoount o’ them sayin’ my playin’ sounds like a spider tryin’ to fart through its ears, mistress.”
– Terry Pratchett, ‘Wee Free Men’
Do you ever have that moment when you work out that you know something that you didn’t know you knew?
The thing I know today is that the German for bagpipes is Dudelsack.
I don’t have a single clue how I know this, or where I might have gleaned this knowledge. I mean, why would a fact like this ever be useful? But I do know it, and it’s a wonderful thing. It does, however, give rise to an awful lot more questions:
Do the Germans play bagpipes, or do they just have a word for the Scottish sort?
Do they all play Amazing Grace on them, overlapping, like the pipers along Edinburgh’s Princes Street?
Do German bagpipes sound just as much like a cat being strangled as Scottish ones?
Which came first, bagpipes or Dudelsack?
Is this like convergent evolution, or did one country share with the other?
Was this an act of warfare?
What about the countries in between? Do they have bagpipes?
What are they called?
Excuse me, I’ll be back soon; I have some research to do. Knowledge might be power, but it takes an awful lot of work to maintain!
“Slowly, slowly, pass away Images my mind has held In companionship of day— In the sunbeams beauty-spelled; Slowly, slowly, wanes the sun, Till with shadows they are one.“
– John Drinkwater, ‘Dusk’
Driving into Dereham, I’m greeted by an honour guard of gulls; each perched on the very top of a streetlight and looking towards the road.
As I scurry by the lampposts on my way to work, they are extinguished, one by one; the very antithesis of “Let there be light!”
Freddie looks at me helplessly as he tries to answer my question, his voice completely drowned out by the roar of the rain of the roof.
In the dark space between rainstorms, the midnight sea outside the gates has grown to epic proportions …. something I discover when my shoe fills with ice-cold water.
The pigeon on the telephone wire huddles down in the rain. It looks as miserable as I feel.
A blackbird swoops low above my head, as if chastising me for my tardiness.
A small flock of pigeons wheel overhead in the morning skies. At one side, a pure white one catches the early light, gleaming brightly. It lifts my spirits.
Having successfully completed a particularly twiddly bit of harmony, Mary and Jess grin widely at each other, their faces reflecting their absolute joy in the sound.
After I use some Spanish to explain the etymology of the word ‘carn’, Evelin shyly tells me that she too speaks Spanish.
The song thrush trills from the branch above me, singing in harmony with itself.
Four kestrels, two red kites, a buzzard, and something that may have been a sparrowhawk. Not a bad round up of raptors on a Sunday afternoon trip … at least something appreciates the A17!
Rooks line up along the wires, heads pushed down into the wind and tail feathers up; athletes on the starting blocks.
Grantham is cradled in a bowl of thick, grey cloud. The further I descend into the town, the thicker it becomes.
A badger crashes through the hedgerow and starts galloping along the road. I don’t know which of us is more surprised by the other’s presence.
The birds in the yew tree scuffle like teenagers, and then still, letting loose a curious, low pitched cackling. Again, like teenagers.
Fitting … as I’m on a soon-to-be-demolished school site for the afternoon.
A blackbird lands heavily in the sumac tree, his bright yellow eye turned towards me, inquisitively.
Standing at the photocopier and dreaming about veing outside, I watch a black bird trying valiantly to fly against the wind, forging its way across the leaden skies inch by inch before suddenly slipping sideways and vanishing from view.
I wonder how far it blew before regaining control.
Jannah bounces into my classroom with a fistful of roses she brought in for her friends on Valentine’s Day. I’m honoured to be included.
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
– AA Milne, ‘Winnie The Pooh’
I’m currently hunched over a food mixer full of butter and icing sugar, warming the bowl with my hands and trying desperately to get two very different substances to amalgamate and become homogenously one. I’ve been here for about twenty minutes at this point, patiently (it doesn’t come naturally) adding a spoonful of sugar at a time, and then running the motor slowly to combine. Bursts of speed every so often allow my buttercream to mix more evenly. Patience is key; too much icing sugar all at once, and I, and my kitchen, will be wearing considerably more than gets mixed in. Ask me how I know this …. 🤦♀️
Given that my kitchen is currently doing a good impression of a freezer, this whole task is a bit of a challenge! My feet are cold. The butter’s cold. The icing sugar is lumpy. I am not a patient person. But the coffee’s hot, and I persevere. Because what I’ll end up with at the end will be glorious.
And isn’t that the best metaphor for teaching?
We are trying to combine students’ brains with material that they don’t always want to accept and take on board … like Shakespeare, or algebra, or conjugations of french verbs.
External factors exert huge pressures on our students; parental attitudes, the behaviour of their peers, their lack of sleep, hormones, grief, responsibilities (or sometimes the lack thereof), and their relationships with others. Obviously, we can’t let those external factors dictate whether or not our students learn, we just have to mitigate them as best we can. So we encourage, mediate, support, and impose boundaries. Little by little, we try our very best to lift students up to the point they can perform at their best and learn what we have to teach.
External factors affect us, too; tech that will not play ball, colleagues that aren’t as supportive as they could be, negative attitudes from students, the ever increasing workload, personal crises, and that loo break that we just can’t find the time for!
But the coffee’s (occasionally) hot, some of our students help lift us up with little kindnesses, and we persevere.
And little by little, the literature (or maths, or history, or french) goes into their heads, they make huge leaps forward, and they do us proud. As with buttercream, patience is key. Too much knowledge all at once, and it’ll be splattered around the room rather than sinking in. But if you get it right, if you persevere, the end result is glorious.
Now, I’ve got more coffee to brew and cakes to assemble.
“Albert grunted. “Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?” Mort thought for a moment. “No,” he said eventually, “what?” There was silence. Then Albert straightened up and said, “Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve ’em right.”
– Terry Pratchett, ‘Mort’
I read somewhere that although teachers only ask between three hundred to four hundred questions per day (and let’s face it, even that’s a ridiculous number!), they can answer anywhere up to four thousand. Let me repeat that … Four. Thousand. Questions. All of which require answers. Whether that’s an accurate estimate or not (I mean, who knows with internet generated ‘facts’?), this week, it feels undeniably true. So true that I can, in fact, feel it all the way down to my bones.
I got home tonight and realised that I was feeling a tad grumpy. The last few days have been absolutely manic, it was Parents Evening for Year 10 on Monday, I still haven’t quite caught up with myself and my To Do lists after the Christmas holidays, and for the last five days, during every single break and lunchtime, I’ve had a queue of students waiting at my desk to ask questions. An actual queue. Some of them had questions about work experience, some of them had questions about College applications, some of them had questions about the new homework system, some had questions about the rehearsal schedule, some had questions about the texts we’re reading, and some just wanted to chat.
So many questions.
About so many different topics.
There was a thread of irritation in my brain through all of it. Why were they asking all of the questions? Why couldn’t someone else come up with some answers? Why me? Why didn’t they go and talk to their form tutors, or their English teachers, or their Heads of Year, or literally anybody else?
But honestly, that was just my stress and frustration talking. The truth is, they ask me the questions because I consciously make a habit of answering them. Even if that sometimes means my lesson goes off on a bit of a tangent*. I’ve always felt that if they genuinely have a question about something, giving them an answer helps foster an attitude of enquiry. If no one ever answers their questions, eventually, they’ll just stop asking them. And that’s a soul-destroying thought. No one should go through life without asking questions about everything. How else would you learn? Or get cross about the things that people ask you to do, but when you ask, “Why?” they have no proper answer? Yes, yes, I am that person.
*Alright, sometimes a lot of a tangent. A mega tangent. A super-tangent if you will. We always find our way back to the regularly scheduled programming eventually!
All this to say that I need to stop stressing over the questions. I will answer the ones I can answer … and write the others down to be answered at some future date. I will smile as I try to wrestle my brain into shifting gears from the HSE’s requirement for fire risk assessments in small businesses to the relative merits of films vs books (Spoiler alert: the books are always better!), and from there on to whether the Inspector in Priestley’s eponymous play is actually a ghost (More spoilers: in my opinion, he is not). I will smile as I wrack my brain for long lost factoids with which to help … and Google the facts I really don’t have. I can do this.
I mean, I still need everyone to go away for a bit and not make me answer questions or make decisions. So I’m going away to have a whole weekend where I don’t have to answer any questions. It’ll be bliss.
absolutelynotnormal 