SCHOOL TALK…
December and January fundraising has been difficult with short dark days and longer, darker evenings. However, a couple of afternoons spent standing around in a cold car park adjoining a popular garden centre has raised around £300:00 in shrapnel, allowing us to fulfil our financial obligation to the Hospice in the Weald.
It was time to raise awareness around the local schools and businesses, and with the car in more-or-less full livery things were slightly easier in this respect. It was a time to raid the e-mail address book, and we had a mixed response; wild shots in the dark, the blitzkrieg effect! Another e-mail, this time to a local primary school, had come up trumps: in order to raise the awareness of our adventure we were invited to give a short, post-assembly talk to 320 kids, ranging in age from seven to eleven. Deep joy!
When the countdown clock hit 165, two more threads of the rich, colourful tapestry came together. At 8:0am a thin layer of ice was scraped from the windscreen, necessary to facilitate the short drive to Paddock Wood Primary School where a parking space had been reserved immediately in front of the main doors to the administration building. Reversing in – and diligently avoiding any encroachment of the adjoining, dedicated disabled parking space – we were immediately informed by the head-teacher to ‘turn the thing around and slew it across the opening in a devil-may-care attitude….’
The talk – scheduled to last no more than fifteen minutes – lasted nearly thirty minutes, and terminated in a short question-and-answer session with the pupils. Who was it that said ‘kids have a short attention span?’ The three hundred or so pupils sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor were a real pleasure to address, and at the end of the presentation their questions were – in the main – both calculated and sensible. As the overhead projector trundled on – in slideshow mode – revealing images of The Gates of Hell, the abandoned ships of Aral and Cappadocia, a veritable forest of arms were flung into the air from all quarters. Suddenly it was difficult to pick which pupil to chose to ask their question. Pointing to an adult-looking eleven-year old sitting near the back of the hall, the question of fuel came up. How much would we need, and how much would it cost? The answer – sourced from our spreadsheet – was that we’d allowed around £1000 for fuel and it seemed to satisfy him. It also gave us the opportunity to expand our answer: that fuel, albeit low-grade, was easily available and needn’t be carried, other than perhaps a litre or so for use in an emergency.
A seven year-old girl sitting near the front asked the second question. ‘What’s that big burning hole in the ground?’ At least it proved that they were paying attention to the slide show, and another opportunity presented itself to explain the potential disastrous results of mixing gas-exploration and explosives. The next question appertained to the abandoned ships on the Aral Sea: we were cross-questioned on exactly why the sea had dried up, necessitating a minor detour into the complex world of irrigation and bad planning. However, it was another young girl who presented the most daunting question of all. She happened to spot a photograph detailing a 2011 driver lying on his back under a car, the rear wheel off and a number of spanners lying around in the sand. ‘Why is that man wearing socks and no shoes?’ To be honest, I was quite proud of my spontaneous answer. I replied that lying around in the shale and dust, a small stone could easily get lodged in his sandal and that it would hurt when he stood up… As an answer, it seemed to satisfy her. The head called the lecture to a swift halt, although I’m sure the kids would have been happy to continue the session for the rest of the morning.
On leaving the school Paul and I resurrected a black Ford Focus from a nearby field before going our separate ways. Exuberant driving on a frosty road, it seems that the owner had taken to the field-cum-verge via a heavy wooden post-and-rail fence rather than run into the rear end of a stationary car. An expensive lesson learned, with about £1K of damage to the front offside bodywork – and a realigned steering rack and a split tyre – to sort out. During the afternoon we had a result on the ferry-front. DFDS Seaways offered a free passage – for a car and three passengers – to France on their Dover\Dunkirk service. It goes without saying that we didn’t hang about accepting their offer. Tomorrow is the last day of January….