The Paroking Diaries: Blog 13: Perimeters and Corona Books

The ‘against all odds’ daughter is measuring perimeters, ‘we’ well mainly ‘I’ measure the sides in centimetres of some rectangles. I ask her to add up the measurements in order to calculate it correctly. She pauses, flicks her hair and says she is working it out and adds, ‘My life is flashing before my eyes’. I repeat the question, ‘What is the perimeter of the shape?’ I add the learning tip, ‘Add up the sides’. She glances down at the paper, which is a bonus because so far, we have looked everywhere bar the maths sheet. ‘What’s 22 plus 14?’ She laughs, ‘I don’t know’. I feel I need to bring in the learning support, ‘What’s 20 plus 10?’ ‘Well that’s easy it’s 30’. I feel the oxygen return to my body. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘But that’s not the whole question.’ She takes another intake of breath and flicks her hair, ‘Can I ask Alexa?’ I feel the oxygen leaving my body for the second time and say, ‘I feel like my life is flashing before my eyes.’ And because patience is drying up in Coronaland, I say ‘yes’ because the only perimeter I feel that maybe useful to know at this point is the biggest ring-fence I can barricade myself into so the kids can’t reach me for a while.

Next up is the teenager’s Latin exam which appears to be something thought up by a pet activist who wants to attend a girl’s night out.

Question 12 – translate the following:

a. The women were speaking

b. The god shouts

c. The dog caught sight of the girls

d. The friends were drinking wine

I pride myself in knowing the word for wine in every language (even dead ones) because it is in my opinion a high frequency word that has crucial consequences to the outcome of one’s evening and it should therefore be learnt by rote. I tell the teenager that the answer to d./ is ‘Et amicos ejus comederent et biberent vinum’. I have no idea about the others or why indeed the god would be shouting or the dog watching the girls, perhaps the girls were quaffing too much of the vinum and they got angry that they weren’t included in this merry throng of tipsy ladies.

The ‘against all odds’ daughter moves onto art in which she is required to design a gadget for a pet. She immediately wants to focus her attentions upon the chickens who have become slightly addictive of late like the vinum. She draws the chicken coop and a mechanical arm and labels it ‘egg collector’. I have no idea how the chickens would feel about their perfectly produced eggs being collected with an Edward Scissor hands device but since they have been free ranging a lot and taken on everything from the trampoline to the swing perhaps, they will let this one slide.

The end of the week is marked with the class zoom chat. I pop into see how the ‘against all odds’ daughter is doing and they all appear to have cushions on their head. I assume the teacher has now run out of quiz questions and this is the next best thing, it is week 11 of lockdown afterall and we would all be forgiven for the downward slide of education at this point.

Meanwhile, the husband, who mainly lives upstairs, has given himself a lockdown haircut because nothing can be worse than the one that I did for him in which one side had a wider perimeter then the other. (Do you like what I did there?) This version is far more ‘matchy, matchy’ and he delights in another self-win. I am pleased because my epic failure at hairdressing means that he will never ask me again and I make a note that the success of marriage is down to boundaries of acceptance and therefore shouldn’t the teacher be expressing the importance of this when explaining perimeters to the darlings and referring instead to the importance of everyone being happy in their own patch rather than anything to do with numbers.

It’s almost time to remove the cushions from the ‘against all odds daughter’s’ head and go to the school to pick up the ‘middle child’ who was dropped off with his luminous yellow band at early o’clock after an emergency phone call to his friend to bring in a book for him as he had forgotten to bring his and the library is permanently closed for fear of cross-Corona contamination on the covers of Harry Potter or Roald Dahl novels. We reach the carpark and he seems reluctant to join the social distanced queue for the morning rituals of dispensed hand gel. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask. He says, ‘They’ll be cross with me if I borrow a book from a friend because they’ll know that he has touched it and then also so have I.’ ‘Ok,’ I say, ‘There are boundaries you have to adhere to, but I think this will be acceptable.’ And I wonder how it is that school has become the centre of ‘no touching’ or ‘spitting’ that it has and books are now an item to be mistrusted rather then devoured. Right, must go, chickens to feed and books to jet wash.

By Annie Hayes. If you like my blog, please ‘like’ it and ‘share’ it. Thanks muchly.