Let it Be Madi

Three interesting occurences happened to myself today.

1. The first, I feel needs a bit of a background story.

Picture this: it has been a snowy week in England, yet the sun is shining. A girl steps off the bus onto a road corner, ready to turn in to her college. She is surrounded by other students who have also got off the bus and are walking steadily alongside her. The girl tries to walk nonchalantly, but the sun is oddly shining down quite brightly on the icy white pavement and as she ponders that she has only seen white skies for the last week her heavy grip Timbalands decide to bail out on her. This girl is me, and those legs flailing around like Bambi's are mine. I lost my balance, slipped, made a big spectacle of waving my arms around in the air and then manage to stand straight again. I decide to laugh to myself in a 'ha-ha-that-was-funny-aren't-I-cool-for-not-being-embarrassed-about-that' sort of way. I look up at a girl walking the opposite way and smile, in which she just gives me a look of sheer hatred. I gulp, slip again, and make my way incredibly slowly to the college...

Now I like to think I'm a girl who 'lives and learns'. I make a mistake, take it down as experience and then move on. ("SUMO", my mum encourages, "Just SUMO!") Now, it's still snowy today in England, except it's not physically snowing. The ground betrays the eye as you're lead to believe that it is fluffy, harmless snow when really it's just really white ice. I now walk like a tin soldier: legs dead straight and stomping heavily so I don't fall again. This morning, I've learnt that perhaps I've taken this a bit too far: as I walked to my friends house a lady with a walking stick overtook me on the pavement! But it's better to be safer than sorry, right?

2. My English class isn't exactly a bundle of laughs (unless discussing semantic fields is what does it for you); but sometimes in lessons I find out something really interesting. For example - now I'm going to try and explain this simply - inflexions. An inflexion in old English is something such as the added 'pe' in the word 'Shippe'. Now from what I understand from my English teacher, the chaps in old England had this kind of code that everyone knew with inflexions. So they knew, for example, that an 'e' inflexion usually meant that that was the subject of the sentence: "The shippe sunk". The subject of the sentence. Yet because of these inflexions the subject could be moved in the sentence so that it might not make sense to a modern reader, but it did to them: "The sunk shippe." Of course that doesn't really make sense because they would also add an inflexion on 'sunk' so that you knew that was the verb... But still, fascinating stuff!

3. The third occurence happened when I arrived home from college...
Daughter: What are you doing?
Mum: (nonchalantly) Writing to the Olympics.