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My daughter is now officially too old for me to help her with her homework. I struggled with home schooling during lockdown when she was just 5, but now she's 9 and all I've got for her is quirky ways to try and remember her spellings (mainly by pointing out the word "ass" today - which will hopefully stop her spelling embarrassment as embarrisment). She was told to start a sentence with a fronted adverbial and said she couldn't remember what that was. I had never heard of such a thing and even a google of it didn't give me any clear idea of what it was supposed to be. They are "words or phrases placed at the beginning of a sentence which are used to describe the action that follows" apparently. But I needed to look at a list of examples to be able to pick something out that would work and I wasn't really sure why.
I have managed a reasonable career as a writer without really understanding which grammatical term means what. I don't know what an adverb without looking it up, nor adjective. I know what an advent calendar is though and suspect that if I got given chocolate every time I tried to learn some grammar that I would have a much clearer idea about all this. In adult life it doesn't really matter - though I did get a question wrong on The Chase because I didn't know about conjunctions (or something - I can't even remember what I didn't know).
My daughter can google -she doesn't need me. She hates spellings though so I was at least heartened to hear that she got 7/10 on her test this week, mainly because I'd gone through the spellings as we'd driven to school. She hadn't seemed to be listening and was just complaining that spelling was stupid (and I had to agree that it didn't really matter as your computer or phone will usually set you straight - as long as you're not trying to write fucking Hell). So my stupid ways of remembering things had got through to her. She's very smart and stuff comes easy to her and she doesn't really want to put in the work if something takes a bit of effort. Like her dad.
She has a great command of language though. Much better than me at her age (and I loved writing stories). Asked to include some of her spellings in a sentence she'd selected wearily and this was what she came up with "The stomped on ant wearily took his last breath." What a direction to go with that, but what a sublime use of "wearily" - the ant resigned to his fate. To some extent an ant must expect that that's how its going to go. Ah here we go. It happened. Ah well.
I think you'll be hearing more from this young woman in the future. I'd hand the blog over to her on my death, but the sudden jolt upwards in quality might finish off a few of my older readers. All my readers are old, so the older ones are in real danger.
I took Wolfie up to my secret other stone clearing field today, where there are interesting bits of brick and tile scattered in one area in particular. Today I found a tile with a crown on it, which Twitter suggests might be a Victorian floor tile. A nice little find, but I just tossed it on a cairn. Where all non-organic objects must finally reside.
Like most of the UK we were pelted with rain today and the sloped driveway between us and next door turned into a river. The drains have been blocked up for years in the village and the driveway opposite was stripped of its shingle and our downstairs toilet gurgled and was in danger of backing up. A siding on the road to the next village collapsed and people at the other end of street requested sandbags on Facebook.
Our slightly religious son loved the water to begin with, but then got a little scared and incredulously said, "But God promised to never send a flood again". And so he began his journey of realising the fairy stories that we are told. Not bad. It took being crucified for Jesus to ask why he'd been forsaken. A slightly scary rainstorm was all it needed for Ernie. Still for now his faith remains largely unshaken. But then he's only six.
