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Stephaniewrites

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Drawing arm gets Christmas boostDecember 27 2008: Look, no rubber: the world’s most incompetent artist has drawn a bird.

The inspiration - and the skill - for this feat came straight out of a book called Draw 50 Animals by Lee J. Ames. I have purchased this book for countless children this Christmas and, having successfully used it to produce a tortoise, decided we needed one for the family. Now my daughter has drawn a horse, my son a wolf and I this creature resembling a bluetit. It feels like a small seasonal miracle.

I have always mourned my total inability to draw. As a child, how many pages did I fill with rubbish while others created perfect, life-like pictures, until I finally got the message? I have zilch artistic flair and just have to accept it. And while it’s tempting to dismiss such skill as being of no value in later life, the truth is that many jobs depend on the possession of a good eye, floristry and hairdressing to name but two.

My daughter discovered this young when her dissatisfaction with the way I arranged her hair led her to take over this responsibility from her earliest school days. I have barely been allowed near her locks since she was five.

True, I have always been able to “draw pictures” with words and expre
Education of extremesNovember 6 2008: Get this term: “multiple exceptionalities”. Try to remember it long enough to research it on the internet, and you will find it refers to people who are gifted and disabled at the same time. In the context of underachieving children, the expression describes intellectual gifts that are masked by specific disabilities, or difficulties which a child uses his or her extra abilities to overcome.

Either way, neither the disability nor the gift is correctly targeted by the school. This mean that a bright child, assessed as average or below average, can become extremely frustrated.

Perhaps I should count myself lucky that in our case this frustration has spilled over into challenging behaviour, so that we have all been forced to ask ourselves why an obviously clever child is consistently underperforming. Hard as they have been to live with, the moodiness, lack of co-operation and propensity to needle others might be interpreted as a healthy cry for help.

Papers on the subject of multiple (or dual) exceptionalities describe cases where a physical disability, like poor sight or hearing, is masked by a child’s superior ability to cope. They also say the situation can be far more subtle than that: high ability coupled with behavioural problems, or with poor motor skills that make it hard to write. Children displaying these often get no help because even when they are spotted, they are impossible to pigeonhole. In today’s UK educ
Church Tower AbseilSeptember 30 2008: I hadn’t intended to take part. It’s a mad way to raise funds and I hate heights anyway, so I planned to take pictures of those who were brave enough to attempt it. But then I had reckoned without the atmosphere on the day.

The weather was perfect. The 100ft-high medieval tower of All Saints Biddenden, Kent, was bathed in late summer sun. There was not a breath of wind and all of nature, still green, seemed to cry out for celebration. Among the onlookers, the tone was quietly jocular as the first batch of abseilers received their instructions. Children played among the slanting grave stones, grown-ups rested their cameras on stone tablets where the dead were forgotten amid this profusion of colour and life.

As the morning wore on and triumphant abseilers, many of them novices, either stepped or sagged off the end of ropes, joining them became a matter of community spirit. It looked easy too, I thought, as I watched the harnessed candidates crawl backwards down the wall like spiders: people of all shapes and sizes had succeeded. If I didn’t try now I knew I would
Moleskine maniaSeptember 13 2008: I wrote the following on 2nd September 2008, at 12.40 precisely:

“I have just bought my first Moleskine notebook and I can already feel the romanticism oozing from it. I’m sheltering in an arcade from the rain that has kept up all morning. Canterbury (Kent, UK) is a dirty grey and groups of bedraggled pensioners are forced to pause before launching themsleves on the weather, umbrella to the fore. I’m sitting on a borrowed café chair to eat my lunch and write, and I’m trying hard to keep the famous acid-free pages dry.”

After trawling the internet on the the subject of Moleskines, I have struggled to find something new to write about the little “cahiers” whose cost (£9.99 in WH Smith) is out of all proportion to their size, 9×14cm. Neither the sturdy cover, the closing elastic nor the back pocket would seem to justify the expense. It was even surprisingly tough to find, tucked away on a special carousel dedicated to travel notebooks and even that, said the sales staff, was an experiment. So why have I pursued this object throught the pages of Bruce Chatwin’s writings and several journalist blogs that have sung its praises?

The Italian manufacturers, Modo&Modo, declare to anyone who will listen that their product is the inheritor of Chatwin’s favourite notebook, despite a 12-year gap in production after the writer himself was last able to locate one, and the fact that the originals were made in France. They wo
Ice boyAugust 15 2008: I met a boy at the ice rink once. I liked to go to the rink after school and circle with the best of them. I tasted the ice with my feet, scraping to keep momentum as I swivelled and shifted direction. I could propel myself just by forcing my blades inwards, outwards, inwards, outwards, angled just right, then perform a quick turn and be off.

There were a few of us who went for the company as much as for our fascination with this cold, unforgiving surface. We could never really speed because of the crowd heaving round, with its jokers and its wobbling beginners clinging to each other. The sounds were magnified by the expanse of white now scored a million times - the shrieks of children, the latest pop on the sound system, The Police. Don’t stand so close to me.

We would be forced together each time we left the ice to make way for the real dancers. They revolved in pairs, the ladies sporting thick thighs under short skirts, cold sneers under bright lipstick. We would watch as they rode the walztes and the foxtrots, showing us how skating ought to be done.

And so we didn’t resist the pull as we gravitated around each other. A girl who chatted to us soon sighed: “Don’t let me get in the way of you two lovebirds.” There, it was said for us and we left the ice rink together.

He was tall and thin and dark haired and could hold me easily on one knee. His upper lip wore a hint of down and his kisses tasted of tea. When