Red Sky in the Morning

I'm definitely a lark, a morning person. I usually wake early and prefer doing the bulk of my activities in the morning. The mornings are my own special time. No one to bother me, space to do what I need to do and no one using all the bandwidth on the bloody computer.

Today the morning gave me a gift too - the most beautiful sunrise. I looked out and saw that the sky was streaked with pink, blood red and pale orange. The horizon positively glowed with the still darkened houses silhouetted against it. The effect was transitory though and within three minutes the sky was a uniform pale grey, the sun having risen weakly on a cold winter's day.

I did manage, however, to take a photo of nature's ephemeral light show. I showed it to Flora who responded with the adage' Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning.'. We shall see.

Literacy, Numeracy and Laminatecy (ahem)

My new job involves testing other people - from teenagers to middle aged people - to assess their level of numeracy and literacy. Regardless of their age or intelligence, people typically greet this prospect with a resigned grimace. No one likes a test and no one likes to find out they are innumerate or illiterate. I, on the other hand, have the advantage of sitting there quietly while they go through this ordeal, thanking my lucky stars - truly dyscalculic as I am - that I'm not having to do the test.

This week, however, the boot has been on the other foot. I decided that I should show solidarity with my learners and attempt the numeracy test myself. So I sat at my desk, took a deep breath and worked through the paper. This was a brave move on my part as maths, or rather my lack of ability in and fear of maths, has been the bain of my life. I didn't 'get it' at all as a schoolgirl and after a while the teachers simply lost interest in me, leaving me without an O' level in Maths. The very thought of having to do arithmetic makes me hands sweat and my heart skip a beat.

It was only when I was in my late teens that I discovered a teacher with the skills to help me and by then I had gained enough confidence to ask for help. In all other respects I was an intelligent enough girl but my utter fear of maths dented my confidence severely. What it did give me however was a valuable insight into what life is like for people who find learning totally bewildering and compassion and understanding for them.

I managed to answer most of the questions but a couple about ratio and converting Euros to sterling I found impossible. So I was surprised to discover that I had achieved Level One and was only one point away from Level Two. This means my arithmetical ability is on a par with a nine year old but, let's face it, that's all I need. It was relieved not to be deemed Entry Level!

Today it was the turn of literacy. I started a course in teaching adults today, for which must have a Level Two standard literacy. As an English graduate and one time copywriter and press officer, I expected to be at least Level Two but I was quietly concerned that some terrible inadequacy would be revealed by the test.

We took the test online wearing headphones, going through questions that involved clicking on the correct answer. The test was simple enough but all the way through I had a nagging concern that I hadn't clicked convincingly enough on the answers and would thereby be rendered a dunce.

Well, I'm glad to report that not only am I reasonably numerate, I am also reasonably literate. I feel now I can set my learners their tests and know that I've been there too.

However in one area of my work, I remain incompetent. I was laminating some documents today and started to wonder what else one might be able to laminate. In a spirit of exploration I took some old pencil shavings, emptied them into a laminating pocket and fed them through the machine. Standing there smugly contemplating the astonishingly innovative work I was about to produce I suddenly realised that nothing was coming out of the machine. and there was a suspicious smell of hot plastic. The reason? It seems I should have put a piece of paper in the pocket and then placed the shavings on top not just shoved a load of shavings into a pocket!

Hurriedly I turned off the machine and, panicking, turned to my colleague Sharon for help. She has huge long acrylic nails with which she was able to prise the shrivelled and melting laminating pocket from the mechanism. I was heartily relieved not to have to confess to our facilities manager that I had busted the laminator by, er, seeing what laminated pencil shavings would look like.

Really I should be praised for my innovative approach to the science of lamination, as I would if I were working at Apple or Google. I reckon they would admire me for 'thinking outside the box' (as we business types like to say). In fact I bet they positively encourage their staff to experiment with the laminator, photocopy their private parts, write 'arse' on the noticeboard and stick paper clips up their noses. . And my pencil shavings did look rather cool!

Shoes, glorious shoes!

I received the maintenance payment this week from ex-h, so decided the time was ripe for taking Flora out to buy some new school shoes. I usually take her the Start-Rite shop in Harpenden where the two delightful Greek Cypriot owners fuss around her, offer her sweets and always find just the right shoe that fits wonderfully. However time was not on our side so I took her to Clark's in Dunstable, where the choice is somewhat limited.

Her feet were measured on their all singing all dancing machine and size 5 and a half was decided upon - the same size as me as it happens. Then I made the fatal error! I suggested that as her feet were adult size, it might be worth perusing the adult shoes too. Excited, Flora took a look at the choice in the exciting adult area and set her heart on a particular pair. At the same time we asked the assistant to show us some of the children's shoes in her size. The assistant emerged from the stockroom with three different styles, one of which I felt was suitable. Unfortunately the adult shoe was not available in Flora's size and I decided to plump for the least offensive, and actually rather nice, child's shoe.

That's when all hell broke loose! Flora was fuming and said she hated the shoes and would not wear them. I just looked at the assistant, gave her a wry and knowing smile and said we would have them. Cue more remonstrating from Flora and a wack across the legs with her boots for me! By this point I was furious with her, especially as she was telling the whole shop how much she hated me. To be fair, most people gave me sympathetic smiles - I'm clearly not the first person to be in this position.

On the way home I was accused of buying the shoes simply to be unkind and apparently I had smiled at the assistant when Flora said she didn't like them and had decided to buy them simply because she hated them. She was not going to wear them and that was that. I was horrible, unkind, unfair and never let her have anything she wanted.

I told her she was bloody lucky she wasn't me when I was her age. My shoes were purchased in Gordon Scott, a big old-fashioned shoe shop in Watford that sold Start-Rites. It's now in the Harlequin Centre but in those days it was on the High Street. I had wide feet with narrow ankes and high insteps so the only shoes for me were called Gina. Oh how I loathed them and oh now disappointed I was when every year the assistant would bring out Gina, yet again! The very name Gina fills me with despair even now.

The assistant did not ply me with Opal Fruits or even smile at me. She was a a very stern German lady with steel grey hair in a bun and a ferocious attitude to selling shoes. If I as much as dared to complain she would slap my legs and say 'In my day we had to wear hob nail boots'. I think my parents were as scared of her as me!

The sad thing is that from my earliest days, I had a passion for shoes. There are photos of me as a small toddler clerking about in my Mum's shoes and at five I remember having a burning desire for a pair of 'clip clop shoes'. I even used to swoon over my grandmother's little square high heels. In those days shoes were an even bigger outlay as a percentage of income, especially as my parents weren't particularly well off, and so your school shoes were it - for school and play. You might have one pair of bumpers if you were lucky but mainly you wore your school shoes as evidenced by photos of me as the school May Queen, all bedecked in flowery loveliness but with my Gina's peeping out from underneath the pretty dress my mother had made.

I've made up for this in later life by indulging my passion for shoes, as much as my income allows me too. And so I have pink shoes, flowery shoes, red shoes, little flat shoes covered in flowers. I love beautiful shoes and find myself hyperventiling when I see a pair I like. And so, I do have some sympathy for my horrible one, who incidentally apologised once she'd cooled down, and have agreed to take her to a bigger town centre where the selection is better and see if we can find a compromise pair. Wish me luck!

To tuck in or tuck out, that is the question?

Tucking in has always felt to me the height of nerdiness. It shows a want of style and a sort of fastidiousness that borders on the obsessive. You tuck a baby's clothes in to keep its little belly warm but no self-respecting fashionista goes around with her clothes tucked in - or does she?

Leafing through the Guardian fashion section I see, to my surprise, a model wearing jeans with her blouse tucked in. On her it plays stylishly on the border between prim and sexy, mostly on account of her endless legs, washboard stomach and small waist. Believe me, if I walked around with my blouse tucked in my jeans, I'd look like I was playing with the boundaries between care in the community and Bonne Marche.

To reject tucking in denotes loucheness, the idea that you've had to put your clothes on in a hurry because you've been doing something much more interesting, that you're abandoned, artistic and really rather sexy. Tucking in is for wimps, for people who are dressed by their mothers and for grey men like John Major was was said to tuck his shirt into his underpants - nuff said really.

To be honest, there are times when tucking in does come into its own. I sometimes tuck my thermal vest (I know, but it is quite a chi-chi one, if I do say so myself) into my trousers but always make sure I have something untucked on top so that I'm not caught committing the tucking in crime.

But when it comes to it, if tucking in is the new tucking out, this woman's not playing.

President Poet

I went to my parents' house yesterday to pick up the children after work and was just in time to see the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The five of us sat there, rapt, as he spoke. Before us was an orator of breathtaking ability, who touched me at a visceral as well as intellectual level. There he stood - still, solid, planted in the ground - and spoke in a way that was at once direct but deeply poetic.

What struck me forcibly was that Obama speaks in Biblical cadences as though he has absorbed the Kings James. Again and again I was moved by the sheer poetry of his utterances, which for me almost superceded their meaning. But then as much as Barack Obama is a man who must act immediately and powerfully in extremely trying times, he is also, like poetry, symbolic; a potent symbol of how the world has and can continue to change for the better. To see a black man take the oath in a country where fifty years ago a black person could not even go into the same cinemas as a white person or had to stand up on the bus if a white person boarded , was the most hopeful and deeply moving thing I have seen for a long time.

Let's hope that he can live up to the poetry of his promises, is allowed to fulfill his dreams and that all the hope and joy that so many people have felt on his success isn't found to be hollow. I for one hope not.

Carwash Art

Last weekend was to be honest rather dull. The children were away visiting their father and I was doing jobs that I don't like doing but have to be done. However one asset I have is the ability to make my own fun. And so it was that I ended up in the carwash taking photos.

The day before I had taken my camera out and gone up on to Dunstable Downs to take photos of Pascombe Pit and the Five Knolls. I took so many pictures of Pascombe Pit however that once I got to the Knolls my battery gave out. So the next day I tried again and attempted to take some moody photos of the Knolls. The fact that my elongated shadow looked unsettlingly like a penis gave, I felt, my pictures of the neolithic barrows that extra 'Wicker Man' touch.

As I came towards my car, I saw that it was covered in splatters of mud and a layer of fine yellow dust so I decided to make a trip to the carwash. Carwashes are boring places to be - your radio doesn't work, there's not much to see and you just have to sit it out. Except that it is also rather exciting. I always wonder whether, if I decided to get out, I'd be flayed alive by the brushes or if I'd just emerge beautifully coiffed and sparkling like Penelope Pitstop in 'The Wacky Races'. I'm always a bit worried that the sensor in the dryer will malfunction and it will come crashing through my window and decapitate me and I'm always struck by the thunderous beauty of the brushes as they make their soapy progress along my car.

And yesterday I had my camera so what better than to try and take some photos. What has surprised me is how beautiful some of them are. The droplets of water look like stars while the blue brushes provide a profound yet delicate background. Two people have described it as looking like supernovae or similar in space. I'm tempted now to visit a carwash with different coloured brushes to see what interesting affects I can get.

Finally, I'm always struck by the fact that carwashes are made by a company in Germany called Christ. Surely it's significant that you go into the great glass canopy and have to stay there until you are cleansed when you emerge fresh and ready to face life. Could I be the first person to see the light in a carwash? Not likely but you never know.

Taking MY name in vain!

In a moment of fanciful egotism, I decided to make a Facebook friend of a girl in South Africa with exactly the same name as me. I was interested as although my first name Jenny is a bog-standard, traditional English name, my surname is somewhat unusual. My family history research has shown me that, nine times out ten, I can trace someone with the same surname to a common ancestor in fairly recent history.

Today though I had something of a shock. The other Jenny said in her status that she was 'excited about the hand gun course. Gonna shoot ya all down bitches :-). ' Seeing MY name attached to this statement made me feel quite weak at the knees. I immediately told my colleagues who knowing me could see why I would find this rather, well, unsettling. I am a vegetarian, abhor the idea of shooting at things for fun, am a pacifist at heart and, an Aquarian through and through, fancy myself as secretly unconventional, idealistic and given to thoughts of good will among men (these are the good bits about being an Aquarian by the way!). I am definitely not the sort of person who would say 'Gonna shoot ya all down bitches' - even with a smiley at the end.

Of course other Jenny isn't me just because she has the audacity to have my name, which may I add I had first! But somehow I felt my name embodied Jenny-ness which isn't about shooting fluffy animals and waving guns around. I am probably being unfair as other Jenny at no point mentions shooting animals or using guns in a dangerous way. But as someone who even feels sorry for clay pigeons, shooting is an anathema to me.

Sensibly I must accept that my name is a label and there is nothing intrinsically 'me' about it. Language, as all we post-structuralists know, is arbitrary and slippery. There is no relation between object and signifier except that which we impose upon it. Therefore it is silly and rather pointless to get sniffy and possessive about my own label. Except I do! You wanna mess with my label, yeh? I'm gonna shoot ya all down bitches!