Blossom and blooming challenges
Sally Bromley is principal of The College of Richard Collyer in Horsham. Her column will sometimes be about educational matters but more often a random ramble about house moves, house renovations, beach huts, Morris Minors, boxer dogs and keeping chickens. all desperately keen to do so and await Department of Education instruction. At Collyer’s we assume our year 1 sixth formers will be spending the second half of the summer term back in college and it would be lovely to see them but we’ve just begun Lockdown II and… we’ll have to wait and see.
At our cottage in our new/old garden I’ve been enjoying the sudden burst of blossom brought by the glorious spring weather. I was puzzled by a particular tree that I had thought was a hollow husk until one magical morning when leaves and then white blossom appeared. I searched Johnson and More’s Tree Guide and Instagrammed images and it was an old friend Margaret, on an extended stay in New Zealand with her daughter and grandchildren, who came up with the answer: “Looks like it’s a wild pear, Pyris communis. I thought it was Exochorda but the leaves are wrong.” And then she wrote, “But you could just wait and see!”
I may just be having a mid-lockdown curmudgeonly breakdown and bad dreams about quicksand but is anyone else fed up with jolly challenges to keep us all cheerful? Several awkwardly choreographed family dances and competitive quizzes later, my husband set us all the challenge of a short story. Mine was set at the seaside with a bunch of weirdly named vintage VW campervans I called the Jelly Bean Buses.
“Pomegadget was feeling relaxed and happily watching the herring gulls perform their acrobatics when she heard the unmistakable sound of Berry-Blue’s horn. To her horror when she turned and looked in the direction of the beach she saw the waves lapping Berry-Blue’s wheels and the children of the family scrambling on board as BerryBlue revved her engine and tried to get going. But it was no good, her wheels had stuck in the soft sand and were just spinning and the bus was going nowhere. Pomegadget had to think fast…”
What happened next…you’ll have to wait and see!