Elephants

These fella's are on the wall in the living room - we bought them in London a couple of years back when visiting my bro and sis-in-law. That was our second visit to their house - the first visit also saw the purchase of two reasonably large elephants that sit outside our back door. Elephants are lucky...we both love them...I am deeply envious that Chris (bro) and Faye (Sis in law) got to wash and sit on the back of the real thing in Goa on their honeymoon 3 years ago....

12 hour day. In work at 7.40am - left the house at 7 this morning, got home at 7.15 this evening. Busy. An important set of exam results due in this morning - needed to crunch the numbers before the school day officially began. We're pleased with them...so that was a great start to the day.

Spent the rest of the day broadly balanced between teaching and finishing off a presentation that I have been working on the last two nights (in total about 8 hours prep, including doing the stats) - ready for a staff development session this afternoon. I have to admit that despite being well prepared, and being in my comfort zone as I was doing the session on something that I am confident and competent in using, I was bricking myself over the training, as it basically involved delivery and explanation of the statistical analysis tools that OFSTED use for basing their judgements about schools and subjects on. The potential for tetchiness was huge. However, true to form, our staff took it on board and I have had some really positive feedback and some discussions about how we can develop the use of these tools more effectively. So thats good.

So after spending the last two nights working till midnight I promised I would do no work tonight.

Instead I have slobbed in front of the telly box, played with the camera including putting it onto manual focus (no AF - dear god!) and playing a bit. Also watched a fab programme on BBC Four with the photographer, Rankin, recreating the 7 images that changed fashion photography - really interesting - great to see how some iconic art was created, then recreated. Fantastic also because David Bailey was involved in one segment of the documentary - as Rankin recreated one of Bailey's images of Jean Shrimpton. And Rankin's image was just as stunning as Bailey's. The elephants were taken before the programme - which was weird as during the programme, Rankin recreated a shot using Erin O'Connor with two elephants which was fabulous. So it had to be the elephants that got posted tonight :-)

Anyway, blah blah ...time for facepack, whiskey and bath.

Step dad out of hospital - despite significant surgery (heart) the doctors decided yesterday there was nothing up with him ...which is very frustrating for Roy, and for my mum, who I know is more worried than she lets on.

Nowt else ...

am afraid work has stopped blip comments - I am crap at commenting - it doesn't mean I'm not looking - just all I have is numbers in my head!