Teachers’ Strike

My Top 3

The day of the teachers’ strike was also a day that very unusually I wasn’t working either. Although I am not sure what we would have done if I had been doing my usual graft. As it was, an opportunity arose to take Tolly (7) out in London to get some on-the-hoof education.

I love bringing children up in London, something entertaining and often free is there at the end of a cheerful bus journey in the front seats on the top deck. We are free as birds in the city. In the country, it would have been a matter of driving him around somewhere, but where? Nothing vastly educational in the wilds of Suffolk, which is where briefly we owned our only country home.

We whirled down our street in the windy sunshine, leaping on one bus and then another to South Kensington. Tolly is our only foodie child, and he requested very politely that we might eat Thai food for lunch. So we went into a restaurant near the Tube and tucked into spicy noodles in bowls. In his pocket, he had secreted a microscope slide from a slightly ill judged present husband had given to our eldest when she was just three.

Tolly was determined to get into the Discovery Zone in the Natural History Museum, in order to view kapok and other fibres under the quite powerful microscopes freely available to children there. I thought it would be more crowded on a day when parents were seeking free-style education, but it was quite empty and soon Tolly was running his hands over snake skin, staring at mouse teeth through a microscope, watching pond life in a little tray and becoming indignant about the head of an alligator (I am afraid I am not sure why).

We also did two brisk circuits of the dinosaurs, me receiving a business call in the middle and frantically following him into the compound of the animatronic T Rex. Which roars. Quite what the person on my mobile phone thought I do not know.