R came to bed chortling the other night, after flipping back through my blog and finding some of my rants amusing. He says I don't rant enough on it these days. So I will right that wrong. I did track cycling at a velodrome a couple of days ago, while being photographed, obviously, it was exhilirating and totally fun, but exhausting and going round and round made me feel as sick as a horse on a carousel. I totally recommend it as a fun night out, not the feeling sick bit, but that's just me, I am sure most of you have stronger stomachs - remember, I spent all those Euros and all that time at Disneyland Paris just queueing up for the others to have a go. But cycling a la Chris Hoy and his mates, up a vertical wall, can't be beat. If you can ride a bike you can have a go. No rant there.

We are now the proud owners of two Brownies. A has graduated from Rainbows to Brownies, and H was very proud to be the older sister of a newbie. H is now a Sixer, of the Gnomes, and A is a Kelpie, which is what I was. Old Brownies feel to their sixes as old Etonians do to their houses. I imagine. With only 24 days left of our Esporta membership, we are using every drip of water in the place for every shower we take, and R and I squeezed in a training half hour in the pool. It was training in self restraint, as the lane swimming lane was busy, ie 6 people when we got there, and the range of velocities was so wide that it was impossible to stay behind people or not lap people. R took the racing line and ploughed up and down the middle, with me using him as a battering ram and staying behind him, apart from when a guy with a vendetta against me insisted on turning right across me and not letting me go through despite me clearly being an Olympic hopeful in training. Then, to bring out the patience of a saint, a chap got in who was so wide he took up most of the lane and took 6 of my lengths to 1.5 of his. The only patient saint tried harder was the Bitterne leisure centre ladies morning, when a lady was doing widths - widths! against everyone else's lengths. Why did she not do half lengths, I ask you? What was she thinking? Maybe she did not have her contacts in or something, lets give her the benefit of the doubt and be charitable. This Sunday our whole family is starting the bargain swimming lessons at the Jubilee Sports centre at the university. I did a couple of the adult sessions 2 years ago when I was just learning crawl, hopefully now they will be able to help me improve.

The children in my class ( 6 and 7 year olds) have been writing recounts about Christmas day, which give an interesting and frank view of life in families in 2010. Either they were all copying each other, or everyone got an Ipod touch for Christmas. I am not sure what that is, but it sounds scary that children that young either want or know what it is when I am not really sure. I think it is like a personal stereo, I had one of those when I was 12 and it was REALLY exciting to listen to tapes of the top 40 from the radio. There were some great bits of oneupmanship, where someone on a table wrote 'I woke up at 4am' and the person next to them woke up at 3am etc etc, until round to one boy who wrote ' my mum got up early with me and drank tea and coffee'. Poor woman, I bet she did, all in one cup, with a slug of brandy is she had any sense. People still seem to eat turkey dinners, although puddings were more of an ice cream variety than Christmas pud. Breakfasts were suitably bad for you, ranging from Candy canes from Santa to chocolate dougnuts, via Lemonade (cloudy). Not all in the one house, you understand. One family were at the Madisson hotel in London for Christmas and had a swim in the pool pre lunch. Their lunch still featured brocoli, so not worth going there if you don't like greens.

Our other piece of work is about the local shops, with a trip to the shops coming up soon. Today we were exploring Google maps.. and I felt like a magician opening a box of tricks, as the children gasped in admiration as I swapped from map to satellite view, and effortlessly navigated the roads of Hamble and showed them the school building and the local Coop and Tescos. Our study is about Tescos and how local shops are suffering, and we have to persuade people to shop locally. The local shops include a post office, so we have one of those as our role play area at the moment, to the great delight of the children who can't wait for their turn to pretend to be the misery guts behind the counter who does everything painstakingly slowly.