Just Words – 3rd August 2021

I just want to play with words
Fumble them around my mouth
First, seconds and thirds
North, East, West and South

No serious poem is this
Just a pleasure for me to write
Pen on paper is bliss
Without them there is blight

---

The Week That Was – 31st December 1978

Gratitude Journal

I am so happy and grateful for the avocado season here, providing lots of fruit for us to eat. Hopefully one day our own trees do the same.

4th Dec 2025 – both our trees died, eaten by some unknown bugs. We have a new one growing but it will be years before it may ever fruit.

---

Tonight I have no extra online teaching classes as Maeve will do her IELTS exam today. She is very good at English but I think she will fail the exam. I am not really an IELTS teacher and don’t really want to be seen as one. I much prefer just to have conversations so that the students feel more comfortable and familiar with the language. This is what I’ve been doing with Ashley. After a couple of cancelled flights to Australia, it seems she may suddenly be able to go there tomorrow. We’ll see. Especially as Australia is locked down and China may be headed that way too.

I was thinking how much I enjoy speaking with those two and why I am more comfortable to chit-chat with younger people in general. Perhaps I’m envious of their naivete and the possibilities they have for their futures. It’s why I want to push my students in the classroom to be the best they can be and I hope I can follow their lives into the future and watch all their stories unfold.

Most people around my age, and even a couple of decades younger seem stale, boring or dead! Or, sometimes like myself, feel so superior in our hard-earned wisdom, feel we are better than everyone else.

I love to teach my students how to find the answers to questions, rather than giving the answers. This skill will serve them better in the future.

In sad news, Mee’s father passed away from Covid at the weekend after being in a coma for a week or two. The cases of death are having less degrees of separation from my life and it is a confusing time. I would like to be locked up in the world of my home, just to venture out for supplies rather than having to come to school each day. Even with no students here it just all feels risky. Along with the vaccines – who knows how that will play out.

It feels like we are living through real history right now but we fool ourselves that we weren’t always doing that before. History is what’s happening, as they say.

I really must try and compliment someone today. I try to see so few people that it has been difficult for me to compliment others. I don’t count complimenting my students, baristas or Amy. That would be too easy. And I’m not about the easy!