A POEM TO BETTY SPARKLES

Betty Sparkles was Ginger's cat. Born on Good Friday 2009, she lived with her sister Tabatha Lily in our house. She was adored by all and even more so by Ginger. On Wednesday 28 September 2011 she died. We think she was run over.

Ginger wrote this poem about her when we told her. Ginger cried all night.

To Betty Sparkles. A poem by Ginger aged 8 and a couple of weeks.

Betty gave a heart a

Heart to believe in.

She never ever set

Foot from me.

We love you Betty

I love you

 

Betty Sparkles April 10, 2009 - September 29, 2011

MATHS FOR KIDS OR ADULTS

Maths is not my strong suit, so when my daughters bring home some maths homework I know that I have to try exceptionally hard for them to assist them in their counting abilities. I will not leave them stranded in the world with the same inability to add up that I have.

Look how much fun and love there
is in maths these days

My own mathematical failures are in no part the fault of my parents. My father, a naval architect, is a whizz at the whole adding up thing. Many a dark night was spent huddled at our dining room table with him talking through simultaneous equations with the patience of a freshly canonised saint as I basically picked my nose gazing at my own acne ridden reflection on the patio doors treading water waiting for him to just write the bloody answer down so I could copy it. I see now why it was so important to show the working, and perhaps listen occasionally.

Which nose would you pick?

But back to this weekend’s maths adventure. A simple enough task. Learn the 3 times table. Oh yes, simple I think whilst nodding sagely at the facile nature of the homework, this won’t be too hard at all. Well it would be simple if you don’t add me to the mix.

My ‘help’ went as follows:

Me: (walking up the hill with Ginger from a bit of run about, thinking that doing homework out in the open will make it somehow more fun) Lets do our 3 times table.
Ginger: Oh OK, one three is three, two threes are six, three threes are nine (pause)
Me: (taking this pause to mean that she might be struggling here – when in actual fact the pause was merely to look around to see where her sister was) Right, why don’t we imaging the threes to be mice.
Ginger: Why?
Me: Because mice are always in threes, like three blind mice.
Ginger: Are all the mice blind?
Me: No just those ones.
Ginger: Are we using blind mice?
Me: No, well yes if it helps, it is up to you.
Ginger: OK.
Me: So how many mice do you get if you have three and then times them by four?
Ginger: (Brain really struggling to grasp the concept I have foolishly created) seven mice?
Me: Close but no. Imagine each mouse has three baby mice. So you have four mice each with three baby mice behind them…
Ginger: umm…
Me: You could count them by their tails, because their tails look like ones…
Ginger: or twos when they are curly…
Me: Well these mice have straight one shaped tails. So Four Mummy mice with straight tails each have three baby mice with straight one shaped tails, how many tails do you have?
Ginger: I don’t know, I thought we were counting mice?
Me: We are, but each mouse has a tail, so you could count the tail or the mouse.
Ginger: Why?
Me: Because…. Well… it is up to you, tails or mice?
Ginger: I could count mice with tails.
Me: Well they all have tails so it doesn’t make any difference.
Ginger: We found a dead mouse in the playground. It didn’t have a tail.
Me: We aren’t counting that mouse.
Ginger: (eyes fully glazed over sighs)
Me: So (determined to make this work) four mice, all with tails, each with four baby mice, with tails, makes….. (Does that eyebrow thing where you think you can tease an answer out of a child with nothing but a look of hope)…?
Ginger: (clearly confused beyond belief) forty?
Me: (exasperated) No darling, four and four and four are twelve…
Ginger: I know, but there are the Mummy mice as well..
Me: (crap) er… but that still doesn't make forty.
Ginger: (look of earnestness in her face) Daddy, my teacher just told us to add three to the last number…like this, 1x3 is 3, 2x3 is 6, 3x3 is 9, 4x3 is 12, 5x3 is 15, 6x3 is (counts on fingers) 18, 7x3 is (counts again) 21, 8x3 is (counts) 24, 9x3 (counting) is 27, 10x3 is 30…
Me: (interrupting) Oh you know that all 11x something is that number twice (OK in my mind this sentence made perfect sense).
Ginger: What? (essentially at this point she gave up on me and ran up the road).

She is right, all their tails look like twos.

So I feel that I have genuinely given our eldest daughter a useful and alternative way to get help with her maths, it is called Mummy. I can’t wait till she starts on fractions because I have a fantastic method that involves frogs and partial use of their limbs.

I AM CYCLEMAN OR A MOMENT OF SHAME

Yes, it seemed like a good idea. All bad ideas start off as good ideas. Little tiny twinkly orbs of goodness shining out of the blackness of possibility. What you never see is the gigantic area obscured by the blackness called misery, misfortune, idiocy and a sore bottom.

Me, Ginger Kev and Mark promised each other we would do the Dunwich Dynamo this year no matter what the weather or personal situation was, as we have managed to find excuses for the past three years. This year was the year. Like blood brothers (although not, because you shouldn’t do that sort of blood sharing any more) we set our faces to the wind of the East.

Ginger Kev and Mark before the ride. Look how happy their little faces are.

For those who do not know. The Dunwich Dynamo is a cycle ride that starts on Saturday night at around 8.30/9pm ish from outside The Pub on the Park in Bethnal Green and we all head, unsupported and quite frankly in my case blindly into the night on a 120mile ride to Dunwich Beach in Suffolk.

We arrived at the starting point and joined the steadily swelling ranks of cyclists who had gathered to torture themselves. The majority of folk on normal road bikes, the occasional hybrid, some funky looking recumbents, a Brompton or two and a butchers bike. We, like all others, jabbered with excitement, admired people’s cranks group-sets and rims. I know, it sounds like a night at The Hoist.

Me. Guardian of the bikes whilst they go for a wee.

A couple of beers drunk a couple of wees done, Mark got some maps (I dropped mine and lost it within about 30 seconds of him handing it to me) and we were ready to go. Slowly, snaking out through Bethnal Green, through a graveyard, some parkland and onto a nice big road with a giant bus lane for us all to occupy.

Despite agreeing to stick together, Ginger Kev disappeared within seconds, he assumed we had raced ahead so he was racing ahead. Which is shame because I was looking forward to his tales of the Fortnum and Mason sit in. Still off we pedalled, caught up with him briefly then lost him again. Turned out he had a puncture.

I will skip most of the details – but the first downside of the ride was when we cycled through a lovely little village by the name of Halstead. This is where Mark pointed out to me we were closer to our homes than the finish line. This small innocuous sentence kicked me in the tenders like a Donkey with an axe to grind. We eventually found the rest stop with food and hot drinks around midnight. A church hall filled with sweaty cyclists all with a bemused look on their face. One eye amazed at how well they had done so far and the other eye showing total fear of what lay ahead. Basically 1500 cyclists looking a bit like Marty Feldman in Lycra.

We all wore this expression.

We waited for Ginger Kev for around 50 minutes. During which time we went from exhilarated to deflated to freezing our aching butts off. Ginger Kev bowled up, got a drink had a wee, ate some food and off we all went. I think you know what is coming. That’s right, within about 2 miles we lost him again. Then I lost Mark. We were all cycling solo. I had nobody with a map, my tiny little LED bike lights that couldn’t illuminate a moth’s behind were next to useless, my arse hurt beyond belief, I was cold and tired and had around 60-70 miles still to ride.

THIS IS THE COLOUR

BLACK 

ALL AROUND

BLACK

It was around two and a half hours later that it started to go a little.. erm… shall we say awry? Following little blinking red lights down country roads is actually quite fun. They are all you can see, sometimes they disappear round a corner sometimes you are enveloped in them, 10 or 20 red willow-the-wisps cushioning you from the stark blackness of the empty and chillingly silent Essex and Suffolk countryside. For several hours now I have been cycling as hard and fast as I could up hill down dale (or whatever us southerners call dales) and had no idea what distance I had done. So naturally I chose a particularly fast descent to switch my bike computer on. 38mph it screamed back at me. I was doing 38 down a narrow country lane at 2.30am with virtually no light. This bit of information scared the total and utter full contents of my colon from me. I instinctively braked, skidded on the detritus smeared across the road bounced into a bush and back out of it again into the path of a mini peloton passing me to quiet jeers of ‘Oi watch out!’ and ‘Muppet’, stabilised and carried on at a much more sensible cadence.


An hour later was the second moment of what I like to affectionately refer to as ‘NEAR DEATH’. I was tired. I had, on advice, bought several caffeine sachets for the moments when I was tired and needed a boost. Up to this point I had completely forgotten about their existence. So what does a tired cyclist do at 3.30am when he needs a lift? Yes! He takes all five of them in one hit. It took roughly 10 minutes for my system to be flooded. It was alarming. My vision blurred. I felt like a super hero. I was a super hero. I believed I was Cycleman! Put on this planet to defeat the evil Red Dragons of Suffolk. I chased the Red Dragons down, the Red Dragons that taunted me, flying around corners, blinking, flashing, goading me to catch them. All the time my eyesight fading, my focal point tripling. Then the sweating, oh my Lord! The sweating, shivers and burning heat, muscles trembling like a shell shocked war veteran. The Red Dragons were all around me now, roaring at me, buzzing past me. I was drinking water as fast as I could aware that basically I was having a caffeine-induced whitey. I was also aware that I might be stood stock still in the middle of a pitch black country road having a wee. At this point I sat for around 20 mins, calmed, re-attached my real self to my body and, as luck would have it, Mark appeared. I sheepishly wiped the sweat* (*tears) from my face, saddled up and headed off once more with a companion.

To see this sign would be nice at this point. We didn't.

The worst behind us and around 30 miles still to go we were beleaguered yet determined. We had given up hope of ever seeing Ginger Kev again. At this point, a low point, the sun started to cast its glory on the horizon. You cannot describe the empowerment that you get when just the faintest light in the sky reaches your eyes. It picks your body up, it shakes it, massages it, warms you to the bone, gives you hope and purpose, erases the shameful memory of when you though you were Cycleman.

We waited for Ginger Kev by the side of the road, about 15 miles from Dunwich. We ate flapjacks, we nodded in the way that cyclists nod to each other as the same people we had yo-yoed with flew by. Ginger Kev turned up, remarkably swiftly and, in trio, we began the final stretch.


Dunwich looked like a cyclists' Dunkirk. We had coffee, we had a full-English, we slept on the stones in the heat of the sun by our bikes. The three of us parted ways (mainly because I forgot to book my coach seat and they didn’t bother to do it for me). Triumphant I made my lonely way home, by bike, by train, by bike, by train, by bike. I am proud I did it. I probably won’t do it again.

As far as the eye could see were people, aching, saddle-sore but satisfied
and proud.

I didn’t do it for charity, I wanted to experience the challenge on a human level not a pressured charity level– but if I had – I would have done it for the Premature Baby Charity, Bliss. This is where you can help them if you feel the need.

Look at their little faces, they are still smiling!