Wednesday 5th January 11

I got up early as it was the first day of term and I had to be around to help.  However, our youngest decided to not try going back to Archbishop Holgate's, and will therefore start a two week trial at the Steiner School next Monday. 

However, as we had not had a reply from the Head, I wrote a letter to him asking him if he'd had it, and if so, he had anything to say about the issues.  I hand delivered this.  Later, we got a phone call saying they hadn't received the first letter.  Gill rang the LEA, and they had been sent a Fax of it, so there are obviously major communication breakdowns at that school.  We'll be invited to an interview there next week, apparently.   I am very angry with the way our children have been treated, and I'm not going to back down and accept that it was all a big mistake.  I believe that the school are denying that they have a problem with bullying as if they admitted to it, they'd be obliged to do something about it.  And that's tough, in a culture which likes bullying behaviour and condones the belittling of people.

So both boys were at home and working, reading, and had a quiet and sedentary day.

I went on the HMRC website and submitted my tax returns.  It took a couple of hours, but ended up with a calculation with them owing me 25 pence.  My earnings have gone right down, so this is the first year I've not had to pay tax for well over a decade.

Got a booking for a Charity Cabaret for mainly retired and elderly folks in February, in Fulford.  Should be interesting... I'll adapt my Woodlands MS Respite Care Centre show for them! 

I made soup for tea... pumpkin and parsnip, as suggested by my dear mother who left a comment on yesterday's post.  I was considering soup but was also considering a nutloaf.  Nutloaf tomorrow... will contain some soup!

At about 6.30, I set off walking into town with our eldest son, to attend the Cafe Scientifique at City Screen.  The talk was by Tim Clarke, from the Department of Electronics at the University of York, and was called 'Control: A Fundamental For Life and Living'.  He's a control engineer, and gave lots of interesting examples of different sorts of controls... from genetic controls with genes being switched on and off, biological controls in homeostasis, keeping our body temperature constant, and biochemical controls, such as insulin and it's role in the management of blood sugar.  It was quite an unusual talk, very wide ranging, from inverted pendulums to flocks of birds through to robots.  For instance, check out this video of the Big Dog Robot.  Really amazing.  At one stage, Tim wanted a volunteer from the audience to demonstrate something, and as there were no other volunteers, I put my hand up.  What he wanted me to do was to balance a stick on my hand... he couldn't have chosen a better person to use, as I was able to not only do it but describe what I was doing.

So, a good talk, I'm not sure I learned a lot of new stuff, but it was good to learn the meme of 'control' and put all these various things into it.  Enjoyed the walk home and the discussions with my son.

My Feedjit widget tells me that over the past couple of days I've had a visitor on here from Buckingham (maybe, it's not always accurate!) who's been poring over this blog, viewing all sorts of links and spending more time than most do here!  Makes me curious!  So hello Person from Buckingham, on Internet Explorer 8.0 and using Windows Vista!  Glad you're exploring!  Do say hello!