Throwback Thursday

Due to work shenanigans I am having to do some additional training (I keep referring to it as upskilling myself to it feel less daunting) and one of the courses I needed to do had an in-person in The East. I'm using that term because, as it turns out, my geography of anything in the eastern half of the country is diabolical. I did sort of know this because I joked with a friend who lived in Cambridge that his retirement plan could be to hunt for King John's treasure in The Wash and he very gently pointed out he was nowhere near there. But that happened a while ago and so I had slipped back into my comfortable ignorance of 'everything over there is 5 minutes away from everything else'. 

This is how I ended up organising to have dinner with old friends in Milton Keynes when my course was just outside Northampton. But nevermind. Those places are extremely close together, relative to their closeness to here. 

That dinner was a long time coming. These people were my very good friends in the late 90s; for the year before I went to uni and my first year there, we used to see each other pretty much every week. I last saw Stu in 2018. I last saw Steve at my wedding. And I last saw Si at Steve's wedding, which was two years before mine. I can't put a date on the last time we were all together (and I have tried) but I reckon, 2002 at the latest. Probably 2001. 

Here's the last picture taken of us all together - this was just before I moved to the US in 2000:

And here's the one from this week (one couldn't make it this week):

Obviously we haven't aged at all. We looked at old pictures and talked about the memories and the things we'd been doing. There is something about the easy comfort of being in the company of people you knew really well once, even if it was a long time ago. 

But at the same time it was a little unsatisfying because it wasn't enough. I'd like to have spent longer talking to everyone. Of them all, I knew Si the best because we were good friends and then we were in a relationship for about 18 months. I always found that transition from a favoured person to the favourite person to just a person quite hard when my relationships ended, because I don't see the need to throw away a friendship because you're ditching the romantic bit; though I suppose it does depend how it ends and both parties have to be into that idea. Still, I felt like what I really wanted to do was sit down and say to him, tell me everything, tell me it all. Tell me everything that has happened since we were together, I want to hear all of it. I don't mind how long it takes, I was always interested in your life and goings on and that didn't just go away when you did. Catch me up properly. 

Of course you can't actually say these things. Much water, old bridge; and I'd never want to give the wrong impression, much like my dilemma about how you ask a man you don't know very well to an event without it sounding like it's a date (can this be done? The jury is still out). 

Anyway. Even with this wrinkle, this will probably be the best throwback of the year! Worth the long drive and the hotel stay. Plus I also learned some new geography and I qualified to approve educational visits, so it was a very successful trip, all things considered. 

Throwback Thursday

I keep this family picture tucked behind my computer tower. 

This is me with my parents and brother on holiday in America in 1986. I think this picture was taken in Gerlach, Nevada. Father Hand had friends there from when he'd spent time in Nevada supporting the land speed record attempt in ...1983? I was a bit young then, I forget the exact date. 

I have an album of family pictures that I made some time in my teen years but this picture isn't in it. I rescued it from Nanny Hand's flat when she passed away, she had it in a frame. It stirs a complicated memory in me, which is that this was a fun and happy day, we'd had a good time playing with the kids of my dad's friends, my mum had that t-shirt on that we all thought was really fun. Then we had someone take our picture and, at the last minute, I decided to pose like this. Mother Hand told me off. It was something like, '...one nice picture...you always have to show off...' This would explain why I hadn't seen it in so long and why my grandparents had it framed but it wasn't in our family box of pictures. 

I can see why she'd be annoyed, I mean, look at my scrunched up face! But I was having a fun day and I was feeling flouncy, but I wasn't after. 

This may not be true, of course. We are talking 40 years ago and memories are funny things. But I keep it just within eyesight because it is precious to have a picture with Father Hand, with the whole fam in fact. 

Throwback Thursday

Since we're currently in Vegas it has me thinking back to our previous times here, but most particularly 2001, when I was living here and Mr Z came to visit for the first time. This being the age of the birth of the digital camera, the pictures are poor quality and very few in number, but here are some.

My handle was Stardust, back in the old days when all this internet was just fields. I managed to get a couple of chips from this place, which has now sadly been pulled down. It was a good old-fashioned casino with the sign in the shape of a burgeoning mushroom cloud, as so many of them were - having witnessed lots of nuclear bomb detonations on the horizon, they were synonymous with the city. 

Me, the fringe and Father Hand on a walk around Red Rock. 

With both my parents, at Death Valley. 

Vegas looks pretty different these days. I know I have a cache of pictures somewhere from our previous visits, particularly in 2003, but I can't place my hands on them right now. It would be good to have a skyline picture to show how much that has changed. They're constantly blowing things up and rebuilding them. I watched a bit of Ruth and Eamonn do Vegas and had to chuckle at the suggestion that Fremont St and the downtown area was hit hard in the economic downturn. Well, maybe. But when I was living there it was already a little seedy and not the place to be. Its reinvention has been epic. 

Throwback Thursday

On this day in 1993...

Today was a day designated for skiving (1). We had the first lesson - in which I wrote my "Chapman's Syndrome" (2) - and then we went on a coach to St Mary's to "practise" ringing! (3) We rang a few things and had visits from Mrs Dawtrey, Mr Campbell and Mrs Fothergill (4). This evening we played charades and wink murder and Beccy's dad bought me a fish cake on the way home. So I didn't actually go to the carol service. In the afternoon, I made the teachers' cake, Michelle's truffles (5) and a guitar brooch for Tim's friend. All in all a rewarding and busy day. 

(1) It was the annual carol service. We always tried to get out of it. It was compulsory. In a delicious twist of irony, tonight was my current school's 'compulsory' carol concert. "Do we have to go?" whined my tutees. "Why wouldn't you want to?" I eventually started responding (in spite of Tuesday's resolution), genuinely surprised. Oh, the difference 25 years makes.

(2) No idea, but Miss Chapman was my History teacher so it must have been something History-based.

(3) A small group of us ringers rang the bells for the carol concert and were therefore allowed to stay in the tower for the entire service because it was too distracting for us to come down partway through. An exceptionally good ruse, although you always have to be very quiet in the tower unless you're actually ringing.

(4) The Head, the Deputy Head, my tutor. Anybody would think they didn't trust us.

(5) Michelle was a wealthy girl who constantly offered people money to do things for her. In 1993, she paid me to make her truffles.

Just fell down the usual diary hole. The week before this, I'd gone to a concert at the Guildhall on my own, followed by a bar with my friends, and then walked to one of the seafront clubs to spend the rest of the night. I'm horrified that (a) I managed to get away with this at 15 and (b) I thought walking that distance was OK. That is FAR. Google Maps says it is two miles. I'd definitely uber it these days.

Throwback Thursday

I finally threw this away this week.

This was my first ski helmet; it was also the first piece of specialist ski equipment I ever bought. I got it in Sauze d'Oulx in 2010. I'd gone with money and intentions - I wanted to finally buy my own pair of ski boots; but when we went to ski fit, the fitter couldn't find any that fitted me. I was in tears. I'd already tried to get ski boots at Snow and Rock, where the fitter had eventually given up and suggested I switch to snowboarding. So, I got this helmet instead.

It did lots of ski trips with me, probably more than it should have done. I remember falling over backwards (how, I'll never know) and knocking my head on the slope at the end of my first week of wearing it, so it was probably fairly useless after that, but I liked it.

Still one of my favourite selfies ever. 

I retired this helmet when I bought a new blue one in 2014 but it has taken me until this long to finally throw it away. I did consider recycling it but I'd live in horror of it going to a charity shop and being used as a new helmet by someone who subsequently got a head injury. Yes, I've definitely overthought it. 

The sad helmet buying episode did have a happy ending, by the way, because I went back to the boot shop the next day and was sold a pair of ski boots by a slightly creepy man from Folkestone. He kept jumping up and down. 'I've got a hole in my boxers and every time I do that my willy swings right out of them,' he explained. Erm...not really OK, but OK. 

Throwback Thursday

Mr Z came across this picture today.

Taken circa 2001, at Loseley House in Surrey, taken by Mother Hand with my very first digital camera, so thankfully there is not significant amount of detail.

I've still got that T-shirt and I wear it to the gym. I loved that skirt, from Lipsy - I bought it with my staff discount at Fenwick. I think it might still be lurking in my house because it has good memories attached to it so I thought I'd make it into a cushion or something.

I've still got that man, too.

Throwback Thursday

I was very excited at the weekend to come across this story about tracking whales from space. This is quite cool, but it wasn't really the story that got me excited, but the person who shared it. I first saw it on her Facebook page and congratulated her there, though it is her PhD student's project to be specific; but then she appeared on TV and I squealed with excitement.

I've known Jenni (as she was at school) since I was 5. We went to the same school together for 13 years and were friends at intervals for various parts of that time. We fell out now and again; at one point she felt I was copying her, which may well have been true. She was very quirky and happy to do her own thing, which is utterly cool when you're 12. We took up bell-ringing and both kept spiral bound notebooks full of dots for playing that game where you make boxes. There were school discos and shopping trips (which seemed a massive production at the time) and lots of visits to one another's houses, although once we managed to wrench open a door in her loft bedroom that had been painted shut and get into the attic crawl space, where we found a baby shoe and a whole lot of trouble when we showed her parents. She came to my 1994 NYE party and the boy I had a crush on picked her up and ran across the road with her at midnight.

I couldn't help feeling really proud of her in a very shy way when I saw her on the TV. Being proud of someone is a weird emotion, sometimes - I didn't contribute in any way to her success, after all, so I don't feel like I have any right to feel proud; but she was always massively into whales and ocean life and it was really exciting to see her on TV being everything she'd hoped to be. I sort of wish I could pop back in time to our 11 year old selves and show them this.

Pics or it didn't happen... here we are at my 10th birthday party, and again on our Y9 geography field trip to Winchester.

Observing my outfit, circa 1991, I think those are Mother Hand's Converse; I loved rolling my jeans up even though it was achingly unfashionable; everybody I knew seemed to have those primary coloured rugby tops. That fringe! It took me years to grow it out.

It's tempting to look back through my diaries for the entry about this trip but it is 23.41 on a weeknight and that's a rabbit hole best avoided.

Throwback Thursday

This time last year I'd just spent the weekend in Portsmouth doing some lovely bits and pieces. Education conference, history lectures and a wander around some green bits of Winchester with Mother Hand. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and the surroundings were idyllic.

I'd quite like this to be my back garden. Pool steps down to the river. Ideal. 

Throwback Thursday

Having the floor replaced has forced the Z household to do some significant clearing out of stuff. This is all very liberating. The poor charity shop won't know what's hit it, and today I have listed things on ebay for the first time in probably a decade. Excited to see that there are already eight bids on 15 items that have been gathering dust on my dressing table for years.

Anyway, with that spring-cleaning head on, I have photographed some things ahead of getting rid of them, so I will memorialise them in my blog, so they can live forever in memory.

Camp America was one of the best things I've done. I went to a Girl Scout camp, Camp Black Hawk, in Wisconsin for the summer of 1998. I learned a lot, particularly about how black attracts mosquitoes, how to dive a lake looking for a body (thankfully this was only ever a drill), how to use a campfire pie oven, how to make people feel happy and good, and how to hide a bottle of tequila and a pack of cigarettes just off-camp so that it wouldn't get wet or spoil. I swam with a giant turtle. I saw the Northern Lights. I learned all kinds of watercraft. I saw the Spice Girls in concert (Ginger had just left, devo'd). I went skinny dipping for the first time in my life (no kids on camp at the time, I hasten to add). I managed cut off from the world for two months, sleeping in a tent, with only actual paper letters and the very occasional email, when I could convince the senior to let me use the computer on site. I made friends for life. It was amazing.

When I signed up to Camp America and they sent me the welcome pack, this label was included. I didn't use it because it looked flimsy, but I have, nevertheless, kept it all this time. In fact, it might not have made it into the bin yet. How often can one thing so small bring back such a range of memories?

Yellow never was, and never will be, my colour.

Throwback Thursday

I've got to stop dipping into my old diaries when I'm looking for a TBT post. They distract me for hours and are almost never anything I can cope with sharing.

Instead, I scoured through some old pictures and came across this, which is the class picture from our sixth form ball, in 1996. It wasn't a prom. We didn't use that word. And we didn't even have a Y11 version.

Some notables: on the right end of the front row, Caroline, and standing behind her, Beccy, in a dress her mum made for her (still love it). They were among my besties and we'd gone together. Third from the left in the teacher row, my long-suffering Latin teacher ("sloppy work") and, on her left, my endlessly patient, eternally cheerful and super-supportive form tutor, who Mother Hand still occasionally sees on the choir circuit in Portsmouth. The bearded man with glasses was my politics teacher.

This was a fun night but I was practically delirious. I'd suffered extreme sunburn the day before; flown back from Tenerife on one of those awful middle-of-the-night package holiday flights; got a taxi home from the airport to change and then on to school for the last day (I think my school is the only one that expected its leaver students to go back in for the last day of the school year); handed out yearbooks; been told off by the headteacher for not censoring the yearbooks (no faculty support = no censorship, was my point of view); had a laugh about how pointless the telling off was, coming as it did after I had left the school; got into this outfit and rushed off to the Holiday Inn. I was overtired and emotional and nearly burst into tears when Beccy's boyfriend made a mildly inappropriate comment. Luckily my boyfriend turned up later and we all got drunk and had lots of fun.

I think I might still have that dress somewhere. It was fabulously slinky.

Throwback Thursday

It was Bath Christmas Markets opening night tonight. I like to go every year. Usually there's a big crowd of my (now ex) colleagues because it's inset day for them tomorrow; this year they were all a bit of a let-down, but I did get to have dinner with Paul and Tom, two of my faces who are both now SLT and therefore can't really hang out with big crowds of their staff anymore.

We were thinking back to year 1 of this tradition, which was 2014, when we also went wine tasting for a leaving do.

It was a really fun night, though it has merged in my head with a meal out we had for Tutt leaving, which involved a particularly epic picture of everyone standing on some steps and J holding hands with K in the front of the picture, while J's wife stood behind. Completely random, and neither of them even noticed until after the picture was shown around. Very funny memories. When we went back wine tasting for my leaving do, they re-enacted it.

I do miss hanging out with this group of friends, but it's nice to look back fondly.

Throwback Thursday

Bear with me if I've told this one before.

When I was a brand new teacher, my childhood cat came to live with us. She had a variety of medical issues that required us to dose her with laxatives and pain pills, and she had to sit on a lap or she would yowl - Mr Z tested this once, she yowled for three hours. In January, she died. I was devastated, having had her in my life since I was 12. I took the day off school to mourn, having discovered her lifeless body curled up on the sofa and realised that, for the first time, she WASN'T just pretending to be asleep when I crept up on her.

Anyway.

I missed a year 11 lesson that day, and shortly after, one of my year 11s approached me about taking on a kitten. "I'd like you to have her, Miss," she said. "You were so sad when your old cat died."

The day I brought her home I was driving a rental car, after someone had driven into the back of me, and I rolled it into the back of another car on a hill because I was too busy looking at her. An auspicious start.

Here we are, getting on for 14 years later. She still likes that chair, but mostly sleeps on the back of it now, where she can catch the heat from the radiator. She's grumpy and almost blind. But she is our mitten.

FEET.

Throwback Thursday

I had a good rummage for a diary entry for tonight. It went on for far too long and now it is far too late, but thankfully tomorrow is Friday. I didn't find anything much of interest. 1994 is the best diary but I was deep in lurve with my first boyfriend at this point in 1994 and some of that stuff is so excruciating I can barely read it myself, let alone share it.

I did, however, find all my A-level Latin books lurking at the back of the drawer, and one of them turned up this gem of feedback, roughly 22 years ago.

I have taken a special photograph of the top section, just in case you can't see it, because it's gold.

Savage. 

Also, a perfect find on a day when I've had to have conversations with parents about lazy year 13s. I was that lazy year 13. It mostly worked out OK for me, especially in Latin. I can probably get away with worrying a bit less. 

I'm impressed to see that we were made to go back and redraft our work, and correct the errors. This is a 'new' fad we're loving in teaching at the moment. Not so new. 

Throwback Thursday

Something a little different this week. I'm throwing back to 1993 and sharing my diary entry for this date of that year. I haven't actually looked at it yet so I am hoping it won't be anything too embarrassing.

Back to school today. They've started building work under the New Hall - we have to go miles round to get to the main school (1). Latin was good - I'd learnt all my noun endings but the test isn't til Friday! Swimming was good - lifesaving. And in pottery Mr B-D LIKED my idea!!! I got some new penfriends too from IYS - details on paper (2). Caroline says she's definitely going to Havant now - hurrah!! (3). Wrote loads of letters - 4 - to Martina and Lena, my old penfriends, the Russian girl, and one of my news penfriends. Grandad came over. After he was gone, Mona's (4) mate Alix came over and we watched the tape he made of their Hallowe'en pub crawl. I was on it! In the beginning and at the end. At the end, Alix was saying to me, "Are you high?" and I said, "I'm very low actually" because I was lying on the floor!! (5)

Not too awful.

Notes:
1. This ended up being a good thing because they were building us a brand new sixth form centre. 15 year old me was not impressed, though.

2. Those old enough might remember this service, where you sent away your name and address and got penfriends back. This clutch were girls my age from Hong Kong, Singapore and Greece - the latter two I remember writing to for some time - and a slightly older boy from America, who never replied, according to my notes. Kraig Brocious, you owe me a letter.
No idea who 'the Russian girl' is, by the way.

3. ie college, as opposed to staying on at sixth form. I spent a lot of time with Caroline while we were at school but I chat a lot of shit about her in my diary. Frenemies, clearly. She ended up staying on and she was one of my squad all through sixth form.

4. Mona was a French student at the university who lodged with us for two years.

5. My level of humour has not improved, you'll note.

Throwback Thursday

This time five years ago, I was skiing in Serre Chevalier with some faves.

We had some great bluebird days...

And some snowy days...

And there was the day when the weather was so bad, the wind was so strong, that we couldn't make it home via our usual lift and had to ski down to the valley (I think past the hotel where I'd stayed on my school trip as a child) and catch the bus back to Briancon. We definitely earned our time in the steam room that day.

Epic night out, on the 30th...

They gave us a free shot after dinner. Stu refused to drink his. Louzle tried to get tough with him and he told her not to use her teacher ways on him, which was funny. It wasn't Stu's holiday, really. He had said he was a really good skier - lots of difficult runs completed during a three week trip to Whistler - but he struggled with the portion of the red run on the first day. Hence, we didn't really ski with him.

New Year's Eve...

And New Year's Day.

During this trip, I skied a natural half pipe and conquered a button lift I had fallen off as a child. It was a great resort and epic amounts of fun. 

Louzle hurt her shoulder doing a ski cross though. She tried to overtake me, dropped a distance off a lip that didn't look like a lip, skied into unpisted snow and crashed through two fences. She has only skied once since then, I think, and that was on the school trip four months after this. This might be why I have never been able to convince them we should go again. 

Throwback Thursday

This week has included the delightful task of meditating on where I'd like to go for my summer holidays this year. It is America's turn, but I think I want to go there next Christmas instead. We've done most of the easy camping we can in the vicinity of Vegas. But then I find pictures like this -

On our first camping trip, we got chatting with an old couple in a campervan on the next site (the man sent me a book in the post the following month - what a nice pair) and they said that Yosemite was the most beautiful. Yosemite was beautiful, true. But when it has views like this to contend with, that's a huge claim.

This was taken in King's Canyon NP, just to the south of Yosemite. We tramped uphill for 10-15 minutes until we came across this view. Completely worth it.

So much world, so little time.

Throwback Thursday

Throwing back to an early school ski trip. I think this one must have been 2009. I paid for a private ski lesson with Jonty and Rara and this was the instructor:

(At least I hope this is him: I can't think why else I would have this picture. Now I look at it, that might be the instructor I had during my inspection visit in 2006. I think that was the only year I hired a jacket that looked like this. But let's say it's from 2009). I don't remember his name, but I still remember his final comment, in a thick Italian accent: "Not bad, for a woman."

Sauze is probably my favourite place to ski. I used to get the coach to drive us down to Bardonecchia, ostensibly for an afternoon's shopping but really so I could go in here and buy cakes:

Best cakes to be had for miles, and possibly the best chocolates I've ever eaten.

Throwback Thursday

I quietly retired the bulk of my old website some time ago now; it was old and decrepit and full of slightly suspect pictures and headache-inducing backgrounds I'd created using the very exciting tile tool, circa 1997. It did prompt me to look back through some very old pictures though: specifically the ones taken with my very first digital camera, that Father Hand bought for me during my stay with him in 2001. It was probably something like a third of a megapixel in resolution, but I thought it was marvellous and took it everywhere and photographed everything.

These are both the Hand parents standing together, next to Badwater, Death Valley. April 2001. I made the picture big but now it is blurry. Still one of my favourite pictures ever. This was the first time I'd had both parents together in about seven years.

Throwback Thursday

This song cycled round on my mp3 player on the way home this afternoon. I drove Mother Hand absolutely nuts when this came out by recording it off the radio onto a tape and playing it over and over again in the car. I think this must have been the summer we went to Cornwall. That's a long car journey.



Anyway, because I'm a geek there's a line in this that makes me chuckle about how dated it is. The second verse is all about how he thinks his best friend probably knocked up his wife. Very hmmm. But he points out that they were so close they had the same blood type.

Pre-genome, of course. That was the only way you could test paternity, back in the day (explained for the benefit of any youngsters).

It does make me chuckle. Makes very little sense now. Still quite enjoy listening to it, though.

Throwback Thursday

Throwing back to this flattering portrait a year 8 student drew of me during my second PGCE placement.

Note the enormous mole, the Hitler moustache, the nobbly knees, the "I heart muffs" socks and the American football shoulders. I was pleased though, because he didn't draw me fat!

Still remember having to tell him off with a straight face and then laughing until I cried once he'd gone.