Grammar

When R and family visited their dad over the Christmas holiday, they returned bearing some old schoolbooks of mine.  I don't from where N (or his new wife) had dug them out - in fact, I hadn't even remembered that I still had them.

They date from the early years at my first primary school.  And glancing through one of them, this was clearly a book to write a little bit about the day.  Since the entry is clearly dated, I know that I would have (not of) been 6 years and one month old.

I was interested to see that I fell into the exact same grammatical error that is one of my big bugbears - the conversion when writing the expression would've, could've, should've etc to would/could/should of.  I see that my teacher at the time had no hesitation in correcting this error, When I corrected one of my girls - at an older age than 6 - they had considerable difficulty in understanding why OF was not grammatically correct.  And I wondered whether her teachers had ever corrected her previously.  Certainly, many people these days reach adulthood still making this mistake.

In other news - we had a meeting with our financial advisor.  We had understood it was to be an online meeting, as there was a link to a Teams meeting on the email he sent - but as we were logging on to this, he drove into our front yard.  A bit more normality.