S. Worthen | Weblog

Apropos of an Oxford Reading Tree book...

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Apropos of a conversation with C this evening.

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Last week in guitar class, it was news to me that "Little Bo Peep" had any tune at all. The other students were mildly astonished; they'd never known it without one.

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I hear quite a few mothers of Grouting's cohort referring to babies as "bubbas", but until this year, I'd never heard it used in that way before.

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Local groups have occasionally sung this one. This weekend, we toured a nursery, where the words were the caption on all the childrens' rocket ship images. I'm suddenly wondering if the song will be inescapable for under-5s with rocket ships.

For my own edification in the ways of foreign childrens' songs, I went to the local library baby and toddler singalong today. Fifty percent of the songs were unfamiliar to me. For another quarter, I knew the words, but not the tunes to which they were being sung.

And then there were moments like this, when what is probably - I hypothesize - a usual British Englishism I've been hearing for years stood out like a metaphorical sore thumb in what was an otherwise familiar sequence.

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We're thinking of getting another set of measuring spoons*, which is why I was looking at them online last night. There isn't that big a range of features they tend to come with. Melamine or metal. Flat- or round-bottomed. Round or oblong. Number of spoons and how small the set goes.

One feature they all advertise, however, is a way of keeping the set together. Handy loop or chain. Magnetism.

C. looked at the images I showed him with astonishment. We can't get those, he said. They're chained together. Use one, and they'll all get dirty!

We keep our spoons loose in a container in a drawer, unchained, although they arrived years ago with loop to secure them.

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* Spice-intensive meals involve going through a lot of them very quickly, and spices require re-used spoons to be both washed *and* dried, which is fiddly when measuring lots of things quickly.

1. My train from London to York died in Doncaster. Fortunately, it developed its fault while we were in the station. But we still all had to vacate the train and decamp to one which came not long after and onto which we were urged, standing-room only and jam-packed. Except, of course, many people then found they had invalid tickets, since the new train was Cross Country and the original one East Coast.


2. The next day, I met up with two historians of science on a bus in York city center. They had meant to arrive an hour or two earlier and have time to see the Minster, but their train had died just outside Doncaster, and it was half-an-hour of waiting before they could be pushed into Doncaster station and catch a different train.


3. Today's train from York to London died in Doncaster. Fortunately, the train which came 20 minutes later had some seats left. It's really just as well I wasn't stuck standing since tracks at Grantham were closed and we rerouted via Lincoln. It took hours; but I'd known in advance it was a hazard of traveling today.

I am disgruntled with trains in Doncaster right now. But I did see Lincoln Cathedral today, albeit from the train.

While in York, I stayed in a house well-stocked in books for young children. One of my hosts was shocked I had never read Meg and Mog. Or Pants! I have now, but he still hasn't read Pat the Bunny or Goodnight Moon.

I read some other books too. Apropos of the first line in Pointy-Hatted Princesses, I have a question for you:
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