My Zambian friend

who runs the "refugee camp"., now more like a permanent settlement, for children sent me an e-mail this morning. She can do this about once a month when she makes a regular trip "into town". It keeps me up to date with what is going on there, how she and the several hundred children in her care are getting on.
They share a teacher with the local village. There are three classes, all of which have around one hundred students in each. There is no room for misbehaviour. The children know they have to help one another and this is their big chance. If they can learn to read and write and pass from one level to the next there is at least a remote chance of secondary school and something beyond that if they are well enough to continue.
This morning my friend was letting me know that the money we had deposited in her bank account had arrived safely - and that it would be paying for three of the children to finish secondary school. They are expected to do well. Two of them plan to go nursing - on scholarships provided by a church organisation. The other is going to support himself as a housemaster in a school while he trains as a teacher. All three of them will return the support given to them by giving a year of their time after training. This has happened several times over the years I have worked with my friend.
Many of the children in her care do not survive. They have AIDS or malaria or other conditions. Those that do survive often train locally. Going on to even the secondary level of education is rare. Finances just do not allow it. There have been only eleven children out of more than three thousand over the years who have reached successfully for tertiary education.
Here our media is raising questions about how the national testing procedures and the national website of school by school results is affecting education. There are concerns that children are being trained to pass the test rather than taught and that schools are trying to pick and choose students.
No such concerns reach my friend or the children in her care. They wonder if there will be enough money to pay the one teacher his limited salary and how long he will be prepared to work under the difficult conditions. They wonder if there will be enough money for everyone to have one exercise book into which the very best of their work, drawn on the ground, can be copied. They share reading books, one between ten or twelve. There are no computers and the sports equipment consists of some old soccer balls and home made rope. Everyone knows there are things they need much more than this - like food and a change of clothes, medicine and the litres of disinfectant that are used to try and keep infections from spreading.
I wonder about the priorities in our education system and the waste of money that has occurred in the Building Education Revolution programme. It seems 1% of that money alone could have educated many thousands of Zambian primary students for a year. I feel it might have been better spent there.

Okay, so where do you get

your ideas from? I am not going to attempt to answer that question from the writer's point of view but, unfortunately for my pocket money, someone came along to our knitters' group yesterday with - some books for sale.
Now, let's be reasonable. I do not need knitting books. I do not use knitting patterns. I design my own. This has more to do with necessity than anything else. Most of my knitting is done with yarn given to me by nice people who know I knit and believe that I need yarn...mostly yarn they have decided they do not need or because a relative has headed for a nursing home and left behind a little stash or...well something.
I am a yarn snob. I refuse to knit cheap acrylic. I would rather not knit than knit cheap acrylic.
I did look at the books yesterday because I am the librarian. Was there anything there the library needed? We still have a little money left. I discussed options with the President and we invested in one book for the library.
There was also a "bargain box" however and I could not resist a poke around in that...which is where I came across a knitting magazine. It was labelled $4. The newsagent recently had a copy of the same magazine for $17.95. (He knows how to charge, especially for the imported magazines.) My paw went out, hesitated and then closed over it. I had peeked insided it at the newsagent and there is one small graph in there that I rather like.
Now, I do not like the garment in question but I do like the graph. When I saw it I thought, "I could do something with that." Now I can do something with it. When I have done something with it someone is going to ask, "Where did you get the pattern?" and I will have to explain. No doubt they will, as they often do, look slightly bemused. Why would you bother? I can see them thinking that. Ideas however are like that. You have to bother about them.

I am fairly certain that the term "abandon blood"

was intended to refer to abandoning war. It is not a bad idea. Unfortunately other people see the term as meaning something different. In the case of one religious sect it has been taken to mean that you refuse blood transfusions - and that you also refuse to allow your children to have them.
Courts around the world are gradually coming around to over ruling parents who make a decision which would deny their children life on these and other grounds.
When we moved to this house our neighbours were an elderly couple. One of their three daughters had taken up with this religious sect. Her husband became ill, needed a transfusion but refused one and died. He was an adult and it was said he made the decision. I never met him and would not have asked.
Some time later the grandson also became ill. He was fourteen at the time. He needed transfusions in order to survive the only treatment which would have allowed him to live. The prospects of a full recovery were put as high as 90%. His mother refused treatment and, two years later, the boy died in agony. She claimed that was the proper outcome. It broke the family apart.
This morning's paper has the story of a ten year old who needs a transfusion. His parents opposed it and have been over ruled by the courts. The child himself is said to oppose it on the grounds that taking someone else's blood is taking someone else's life and that he will no longer be himself. Somewhere along the line the message that someone is giving him the greatest gift of all has been twisted.
If the child survives the treatment for a fairly rare osteo-sarcoma and grows to adulthood I wonder what he will then believe. If faced with the same decision would he give or withold?
My mother always wanted to deny us all any medical treatment. It was part of her religious upbringing. My father, brought up in the more robust and practical Presbyterian tradition, managed to over rule her in such matters as immunisation. It was, however, always a source of tension between them. None of us ever needed a life-saving transfusion but I believe she would have been over ruled had it been necessary.
I wonder though at parents, particularly mothers, who can deny their children life-saving medical treatment. Why is it that even the most intelligent of humans can allow emotion to overtake reason - and what sort of emotion allows people to choose death over life?

An author is looking for answers

over on the Fidra Bookshop blog. Do go and take a look. I have answered all but the last one.

The first, can a centaur fit in a tent, is obvious. Yes, if the tent is big enough. It depends on the size of the centaur and the size of the tent. I do not know much about centaurs but I have always assumed them to be about the size of a horse. Perhaps I had better go back and check in Diana Wynne Jones "Tough Guide to Fantasyland."

Then there is the question about what fairies pack for a camping holiday. That answer is obvious too - fairy cakes and fairy dust. The first to sustain them and the latter is magical stuff that should provide anything else they need....but I wonder if it includes the tent for the centaur?

Now, the next question was a little more difficult, what do selkies eat at feasts? Well yes I do know what a selkie is...my paternal grandfather made sure I knew that at a very early age - after all some selkies did migrate Downunder. Vanessa mentions fishcakes and I am equally certain that seaweed would appear on the menu. There would be seaweed soup, seaweed parcels and seaweed bread. All of this would help them to keep slim and healthy. There will be no sushi however. I am convinced selkies are, like me, allergic to vinegar.
Harvesting seaweed would not be a problem. Selkies cannot breathe under water - but they can hold their breath for an extraordinary length of time.

That left all but the last question answered. That concerned the names for two ocean powers whose battles cause the storms to rise at sea. I am still puzzled by this. The answer has to be in Gaelic and Norse mythology...something I know less about than I should. There are storm kelpies and seonaidh but they are not, as far as I know, storm raising powers. I still do not know whether there are two ocean powers in Gaelic and Norse mythology but there are names that might suit, Murcadh (sea warrior) and Moray (also a sea warrior). There is also Kedehern (battle lord) but he may be more of a land man, there is Badb (god of fury) and there is the real life Somerled...
I do not know the answers but the names fascinate me....I might just go back to Fidra and add the first two. Does anyone have more suggestions?

The true awfulness of my various school uniforms

has almost certainly upset my dress sense for life.
There was no uniform in the infants section of my first school but my mother made one for me anyway. I do not know where she obtained the material. My paternal grandfather was a tailor but he would not have given her the piece of men's suiting my mother turned into a pleated skirt with cross over straps. All the other little girls wore tartan or grey skirts with bodice tops over which you put your school shirts and cardigans. To add insult to injury my mother also made me two grey dustcoat like garments "to keep your nice skirt clean". She borrowed the pattern for these from a mother a couple of doors down. The kids in that family went to the Catholic school and I endured hell at school because of those dustcoats. "I'm sorry dear but your mother says you have to wear it," the teachers told me. I think they felt sorry for me too.
By third grade you were expected to wear uniform. In winter you were supposed to wear a grey box-pleated tunic affair if you were a girl. It was the sort of garment you can see in illustrations from the school stories of the 1920's and, although I may be in my ninth life as a cat, I am not that old. Even then however I was marked out. I had grown enough that the pleated skirt no longer fitted. (It was always on the skimpy side.) My grandfather would willingly have made me a tunic. We could have bought a secondhand tunic. Instead my mother obtained a piece of dark brown wool from somewhere and made a tunic. It was the wrong colour and it was not well made. I had to wear it anyway. What is more I wore it with the navy and grey tie that was part of the real uniform. The tunic was too big to begin with, too big and too long. I was supposed to 'grow into it'. I hated it but I wore it because there was nothing else to wear. I was still supposed to wear the dustcoats too. In summer I wore one of two checked dresses, also made by my mother. I am certain she could have bought the right colour check but mine were different.
When we moved to the bush even my mother could no longer pretend that the brown tunic fitted. The new school had grey tunics for winter and nylon shirt-waist dresses for the summer.
My mother found a secondhand grey tunic for me and my sisters and I wore the vile nylon in the summer. My brother had to wear nylon shirts. In temperatures that often soared to the old 115'F nylon was hot and gradually rotted. It is just as well we did not stay in that location too long.
After that I had a succession of school uniforms that were, more or less, what everyone else was wearing. My mother could no longer get away with dressing me differently because my father was now the school principal. That is, until my last school. Rural schools finished at the British equivalent of the third form. If you wanted to go on you had to go away to school and away I was sent, so was my brother and (eventually) one of my sisters. At my last school there was a uniform list. I was back to a secondhand brown tunic. The blouses were mustard yellow. My house tie was brown. All of that was vaguely bearable because everyone else had to wear the same. along with brown check shirt-waist dresses in summer and white garbadine shirt-waists on Sundays if you had not been confirmed in that particular faith - those who had been confirmed wore white robia spot voile dresses.
There was however something on the uniform list that caught my mother's eye. It was the gym costume. Now I knew I would not be doing gym whatever my mother said but she insisted that I would be. The uniform list said, "Gym bloomers, brown. Pattern to be obtained from school."
My mother asked for the pattern. I think she was almost certainly told that these were no longer worn. The uniform list had not changed in twenty years at least, possibly longer. The pattern obtained she went ahead and made me a pair of gym bloomers. They were, quite literally, knee length bloomers like some elderly women still wore back then. My maternal grandmother wore them. My paternal grandmother had long since graduated to something more comfortable.
I went to school with these things packed in my case. The gym teacher took one look when I showed her and said, "You most certainly do not have to wear those things. Give them to me. Now, take yourself off for a walk or ride your tricycle around the block or something while the rest of us are busy."
I pedalled off gratefully. My sister attended the same school two years later. My mother made no mention of bloomers. My sister, never backward about coming forward and considerably more interested in clothing than I was, redesigned the school uniform. Bloomers did not appear on the list - and neither did box pleated tunics.

My distant friend Randolph Stow

died on Sunday. He was 74. We had not seen one another for years and rarely corresponded. He, like other writers of my acquaintance, had retreated to England. He did that back in 1969. I was still in teacher training college. He was busy being uncomfortable about being a writer.
Judith Wright had introduced him, as she introduced so many other writers. On this occasion however it was with the exasperated words, "Cat, for goodness' sake take this idiot boy off my hands and tell him people DO want to hear what he has to say."
I was left with a man who looked more like three than thirty. He was standing there trembling with fear because he had to talk to a group of assembled writers and readers. His face, the sort that never quite grew up, was pale and he just made it to the ground under the nearest tree where he sat cross legged, hugging his arms around his knees and saying, through gritted teeth, "I really, really don't think I can do this."
I said, "Stop thinking of yourself as Midnite and start thinking of yourself as Khat."
"Oh God! You've read it. What did she call you, Khat?"
"Cat...but I am particularly fond of Siamese. I live with two."
"Tell me about them."
So I sat there and talked about Siamese cats to a man I had never met before until he was taken away to perform. Once he was standing in front of the audience he did not do a bad job but he hated every minute of it. The moment it was over he came straight back to where I was still sitting and said,
"Can we get out of here now?"
I indicated that there was a book signing to get through.
"Oh, come and talk to me there. Nobody is going to want to buy mine."
That was 1968 and the book was Midnite. It ended up selling very well indeed. It is still one of the most popular books on literature courses in Australian schools.
What I remember most though is his genuine fear of getting up and talking about his writing. He was an intensely private person. There is a dark side to his writing, even to Midnite.
There was a book he felt he needed to write. It eluded him for years and caused a huge gap, one of almost twelve years, in publications. When he did publish something new it was still not what he really wanted to write. Visitants came eventually but he always doubted it.
I have no doubt though that he understood the writing process. There is a short exchange in Midnite where Midnite asks, "What is a typewriter?"
And Khat, who is a very wise Siamese cat, answers, "It is a machine for writing books. One hundred years from now people will be preposterously lazy."
In the context of the book it is a very funny little exchange. In real life it showed that the author understood just how difficult it is to write. It is much easier to be preposterously lazy.

I have reverted to Imperial rather than Metric

this morning. It is that time of the year when it is necessary to do what my paternal grandmother referred to as "a boiling". In other words I am making marmalade.
Stephen, who comes once in a while to help with the heavy garden jobs, was here yesterday. He picked the fruit for me because it involves clambering across a garden bed and then between a rainwater tank and the fence. He will get paid in marmalade, indeed offered to go and get extra sugar if needed because he prefers home made to shop bought marmalade.
The recipe I follow is old, very old. It refers to pounds and quarts. When I was contemplating this exercise on Sunday and telling Ms Whirlwind about it she was puzzled. Ms Whirlwind knew about pounds but had never heard of a quart. I hastened to educate her. I believe her father continued the exercise on the way home. She now knows about pints and gills and chains and links as well. (He is, I suspect, better at this than I am.)
My paternal grandmother used to slice the fruit by hand. She had a small and exceedingly sharp knife she kept for the purpose of cutting fruit. Her marmalade was characterised by extremely fine shreds - Oxford thick cut for her. I do not attempt to emulate this. I use a nifty bright orange Swiss designed cutter. It does the same job in about a tenth of the time.
So, this morning the kitchen has a steamy perfume of cooking grapefruit about it. There are four pounds of fruit and four quarts of water in the big preserving pan. They had been sitting there all night. I lit the gas under them early this morning and brought it to the boil. I added twelve pounds of sugar a short while ago. Now it is cooking with the gentle surging and rolling of a contented volcanic pool ready to release an explosion of flavour on toast at some distant point in the future.
It all seems very old somehow. I wonder when marmalade was first made. Who had the idea? In which kitchen was it first made? Did they do it in Imperial or Metric? Or was it, and I suspect it was, just done until it seemed "about right"?