In the middle of a busy day, I sneaked an hour up at the Community Orchard in Cleeve Prior, where there was no dragon activity at any of the ponds, but the strips of long grass and wild flowers between the rows of fruit trees were busy with damselflies and butterflies. I already had more than enough photos to give me plenty of choice for this post, and was heading back towards the road and my parked car, when I spotted the first Marbled White of the year through a mass of intervening plant life, and promptly forgot about everything other than trying to capture him on camera. I was lucky that he was a little torpid, and therefore inclined to stay in one place, but less lucky in the fact that numerous other butterflies – mainly male Meadow Browns – were bombing about the place, stopping to check out anything that caught their attention, and he was bounced off this perch a couple of times before I managed to get to a gap through which I had a reasonable view.
This afternoon R and I drove down to Slimbridge to receive the Boy Wonder from his mother and bring him back to the Shire for the weekend. He’s suddenly shooting up, and has recently had his hair cut short all over, and this, combined with the sudden appearance of the kind of erratic behaviour known in our house as Random Acts of Boyness, makes him seem quite a lot older than his five years. This is reinforced by some of his utterances: “I do love coming to Slimbridge,” he said in a wistful kind of voice, leaning on a rail by the swan pool and gazing down at the waterfowl; and then later at home on catching sight of his swing seat, which R had wrapped around one of the supports to get it out of the way while he was cutting the grass: “What on earth has happened to my swing?”
One of the nicest bits of my day was reading his bedtime stories, which took far longer than it should have done because he kept saying things like, “Wait! Stop – go back. That word says…. c..lu..m…….p. Mu..pu. Clu..mu..pu. Clump! It says clump! Does it??” The most impressive thing about this is not that a five-year old is learning to read – charming though that always is – but the fact that The Boy is at a Welsh-speaking school, which means that all the teaching and learning is conducted in Welsh. So his formal training in reading and writing is happening in a language that works entirely differently to – and according to him, far more sensibly than – English, and he’s learning to read English in his own time, while doing story time at home with various members of the family. He’s also becoming very competent with numbers – unsurprisingly, when I think of the mathematical ability on both sides of his family – and this time it seems that he can work equally well in Welsh and English. The one thing he still needs to learn though, in either language, and as quickly as possible, is not to speak down to his grandmother: on me commenting that I was impressed by a sum he’d just done, he gazed at me under lowered eyebrows and replied, “Maths, Grandma. We don’t say sums – we say maths.”
R: L2, C10, D15
