The Garden Fence - proper Old Style support and chat!

Florenceem

VJsmum - sounds like me - I made a fantastic roman outfit that wasn't placed.
I did have a success when youngest Son was The Mad hatter - his costume was home made and the Queen of Hearts looked great - was a bought one but Teacher said my Son's was the best costume. I had spent ages making a cardboard top hat so was pleased.
monnagran - that is so funny about the Gorilla.
silvasava - very true about still making costumes when children are grown up. My eldest Daughter worked in a bar/nightclub which had a themed night so needed costumes. Middle Daughter when she was a teacher asked me to make caps and aprons for all the girls in her class for A Great Fire of London assembly. 
GrannyKate - yes once people know you can sew - get asked to make stuff. I was taking DGD to school and ended up making 32 Elf hats for the Christmas production. I was given special measurements for one boy who had a rather larger head than the others. I was glad to see the back of green felt from my craft room.

pollyanna_26

Florence I'd be wary of talking  about Roman Outfits. Mar seems a bit quiet at the moment but if she's still in her Roman phase she may demand one.

I've been wondering if you covered that chair yourself.I think I may have found a fabricaholic.

Eldest dd and I spent many happy hours snapping up Cath Kidston and Laura Ashley fabrics when they sold the companies plus Liberty and many others.My favourites are Cabbages and Roses and I was lucky to buy a range of them before the designs were archived.

My youngest dd loves VW camper vans and I was lucky to come across a large bale of fabric. Pastel coloured campers on a white background.

I do crochet from time to time but tend to knit more and do counted cross stich on very fine linen fabric.

Crafts and books have kept me going in the past year.

pollyx

monnagran

Oh Polly.  Don't even get me started on school trips!

greenbee

monnagran said:

Oh Polly.  Don't even get me started on school trips!

Please do Polly. We know the stories will be good  

pollyanna_26

I think most of my accounts of school trips have been on the fence before.. The one that sticks in my mind is racing after the naughtiest boy in middle infants through Chester Zoo. The high spot of the day is the Penguin Walk when they open the gate and the penguins walk down the very long path through the onlookers. The naughtiest boy wanted to take a penguin home and i was tasked with stopping him. I've never run so fast in my life shouting excuse me, excuse me. I managed to grab him at the last minute and he kicked me. I ended up dragging him back screaming and shouting. Our head was a lovely woman but sometimes I thought she imagined I was Mary Poppins. Because I had four children I was handed the sick bowl as we boarded the the coach.One of my friends sons was a thrower upper so would be next to the window besides me. Oh the joy I used to wonder how he could continue to be sick throughout the journey and again on the way back.. I met the former head at a fitness class a few years ago
and she informed me I held the record for being at the school and all my children attending too. 21 years . I told her people get less for murder.

There was one class from reception to leaving junior school  age who were known as the naughtiest class in the school and I was lumbered with them in middle infants. We used to discuss in the staff room who would turn out ok and who wouldn't. Years later some of the boys were in the local paper with court appearances and a couple of girls too. Exactly as we'd thought. The one I ran after turned out well we put that down to all the fresh air and exercise he'd had on school trips..

pollyx

pollyanna_26

My last cheque book isn't as venerable as yours monna. The last cheques i wrote were in March 2014. Two seperate cheques each for £15. It's taken me ages to remember who Petlog are but those payments were for the rescued cats chips.

I've no idea why I've kept it but it has a leather cover with Girobank in faint gold letters. That was a local bank and it as only recently it was set up by the Post Office. Some years later it became Alliance and Leicester. I think it was Abbey National for a while as I used to do my banking when I paid my mortgage.. It finally became Santander. On the first lockdown day last year I had a very rude cashier when I went in to pay a bill. Banks were to stay open until late afternoon. The young new man who served me informed me old people were putting him at risk by coming in to the bank. The manager was listening and I think someone may have been handed their P45 as I've never seen him since.

When i checked my telephone banking the payment hadn't gone through and  of course the branch was closed.

It took me about a week to get through to somone in the call centre. They were run off their feet trying to handle many calls. She was only a few miles from here. She looked at the transaction and told me the cashier hadn't done the final click to send the payment through. By then it was overdue but she sorted it out and put the charges back in my current account. I had been considering changing banks but she was so helpful I decided to use telephone banking from then on and it's been fine. It's much quicker than going to town to the bank.

I had a long and busy day on Thursday doing two lots of shopping and picking up dds meds. In fact I had to do it in stages. Took the coop shopping to youngest the back to town for the meds and marks. I've been unable to get the instant hot chocolate sachets in Marks lately. When I looked on the box they're packed in Germany so I thought they were a Brexit victim. However the shelf was full and i bought seven boxes. Me and my hot chocolate are a source of amusement to the till staff. I get quite agitated if they're out of stock. The first time I tried them I wasn't sure if I'd like them. I stopped buying Cadbury's hot chocolate when they sold to America. The hot chocolate changed as did the chocolate.

These sachets are £2.50 for a box of 10. So 25p each. The dried milk is already in them they just need hot water so no faffing with milk. They're very strong so I use three quarters of a sachet and add the saved ones to make a few more drinks.

Good news is while I popped back to town on Thursday youngest sorted out the dark screen unless it's plugged in problem with my laptop by altering the settings.

pollyx

monnagran

Morning all.

Polly, I can just visualise you chasing an errant schoolboy through Chester Zoo.  I was once Tannoyed in Chessington Zoo in the days when it was still just a zoo. "Will Mrs C please collect Peter.....from the reception area.  He says you will probably kill him."
The worst time ever was when we took a Class of 10/11 yo girls to the theatre in London.  I've told this story before, probably more than once, so I'll give you the bare bones.  All went well until we arrived at Waterloo on the journey home.  We had the right number of girls, but one of them wasn't ours. A girl from another school party had got chatting to our lot and had somehow attached herself to them when we moved off.  At the same time, one of ours had nipped off to the loo and when she emerged we had all disappeared.  Another school group was hysterical because one of their girls had completely disappeared.  This was in the "olden" days, i.e. before mobile phones.
I'll spare you the complicated story of how the swap was finally made, but we arrived back about 3 hours late to be greeted by exhausted and frantic parents.
One of those occasions when time heals the wounds, but never manages to completely erase the scars.

I feel exhausted myself just thinking about it.

THOUGHT FOR SUNDAY 

Pain insists on being attended to.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our consciences, but shouts in our pains.  It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.   (C S Lewis)

pollyanna_26

We were fortunate never to find ourselves with an unknown chils and one of ours missing. The girls weren't usually a problem. We had one who always insisted she wanted to go on the trips but often would start crying as we came out of the Mersey tunnel on our journey or when we finally arrived at out destination. She wanted to go home now. When I watched Willy Wonka I realised we'd had a Verruca Salt with us,loud voice and much stamping of feet.We adopted the Nothing to see move on attitude. We couldn't take a coachload back.

We only had one girl go missing suddenly. She was a very quiet ,dreamy sort of girl. Staff and those brave mums who were with us (many only once) would have a firm grip on the known runaways apart from Penguin boy who would have janked someones shoulder out of the socket rather than be held onto.

So we'd been though the tunnel and headed to Trentham Gardens. Did the head count on arrival and started on a nice amble on a hot, sunny day. Sitting down for lunch someone realised the quiet girl was missing so it was check the toilets, speak to the garden staff but no joy.

There's a lot of water at Trentham Gardens including a very large lake so a few of us formed a search party while the children carried on with their lunch totally unaware . The park staff and a lot of kind visiters joined us but it was almost an hour before we found here as we were at the point of calling the police.

It was like a scene from a childs storybook, she was curled up behind a tree a battered daisy chain in her hand and a lopsided one on her head fast asleep. Huge sighs of relief all round and a little girl with one side of her face sunburnt although she'd had suncream on. She was lucky as were we that nothing bad had happenend to her.

.We were overdoing the head counts on the next trip so settled for any trouble and you miss the next day out which worked really well.

It didn't stop Penguin boy breaking free and I had a big smile on my face as I said goodbye to him knowing he was headed to Senior School in September.

Thank you for the CS Lewis monna. You've reminded me of the Shadowlands dvd in my cupboard. Anthony Hopkins made a wonderful C S Lewis and the actress playing Joy Gresham was perfect too.

When I watched Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp playing J M Barrie I suspeced a lot of his characters interaction with the boys was based on Shadowlands.

I may watch Shadowlands tonight rather than the endless Cal the Midwife repeats.

It's lovely and sunny here today though not very warm. It's a hopeful sign of better weather to come. Mother nature continues her work with more of the spring bulbs coming into flower and some trees blossoming. Lighter mornings and lengthening days should chase away the gloom. Whatever the situation the world keeps on turning and I hope we all get to enjoy the sort of days that lift the spirits.

pollyx

VJsmum

In a past life i took students on study visits abroad.  The fact that they were adults did not generally make it easier - they all acted like all responsibility had left them, even those who were married with kids.  Then you throw alcohol into the mix.....

When i took some to Dubai, i went to great pains to impress on them the severity of the punishments for things like drug taking or homosexual acts ("You will get the death penalty - not i nor anyone else is likely to be able to save you").  They were allowed to drink in hotel bars (there are no pubs, bars or alcohol in supermarkets) but could not be on the streets drunk (it's one reason why Dubai is actually really safe) so it was impressed on them that they had to take taxis everywhere.  Fortunately there were no incidents.  The second time i went, we were on the plane at Heathrow and there was a kerfuffle up the front.  One female student came up to me and said "*bob* won't get on the plane, he's at the gate but says he's too scared of flying and can't get on it".  As I am also scared of flying my colleague went to see if he could help - but they wouldn't let him off (apparently you can't leave an aircraft and get back on again - who knew?).  Eventually a flight attendant came up to me and said she'd tried to persuade 'Bob' but he was adamant that he wasn't coming and they'd no choice but to leave without him.  it was 10.00 at night and he was stranded airside at Heathrow!  I did manage to phone him and he said he was OK, at which point all phones had to be turned off and off we went!  I did make sure that he'd got home safely as soon as i could... 

nannywindow

Hello all, your lovely, funny tales of school days has made me smile and brought back happy memories after having some bad news. Anyway in DD's infant days I was always roped in for school trips and usually got stuck with all the poorly children, the walking wounded and/or the ones that didn't really want to be there, especially when we visited a museum. It would have been easier to herd cats   I can still hear the teachers shout "go to Mrs B she'll take care of you " In school I was the cooking "helper" for the youngest teacher and ended up making pancakes, welsh cakes etc. with the children myself. I was always asked to do some crafty things for the fete, but the Xmas shows were the worse as I and another Mum worked as stage hand, seamstress and all round sorter out of problems " X has forgotten her halo can you make one quickly, she's on in 15 mins ? " or "we need 3 different kings crowns and cloaks made by tomorrow " By heck they were the good old days