Pictures in My Mind

When Emily came home last weekend she asked where one of her old toys was. 2XL is an interactive robot that works with cassette tapes and he also plays ordinary cassette tapes and that was why she wanted him after so many years. Someone had lent her a set of Chaucer tapes and she had nothing to play them on because we have cd's now. Surprisingly I knew exactly where 2XL was because I had almost thrown him away last year, but Emily had loved him so much that I couldn't bring myself to part with him. After such a long time he needed a new set of batteries and he was a bit sluggish when he first started but he was soon chatting away in his robot voice, making corny jokes and asking endless questions. She took him back to university to play her Chaucer tapes and a couple of weeks ago I joked with her about listening to Chaucer spoken in a Robot voice with an American accent. It plays tapes normally except for the special robot ones but she said that the miller sounded very much like one of her uncles who has a strong Plymouth accent, he also has amazingly curly eyebrows so rather than Chaucer in a robot voice she is listening Chaucer with a strong Devon accent and amazing eyebrows!

Happy Birthday 21.12.07

Thursday started horribly early, Robbie wanted to make an early start and Sam wanted me and the girls to be ready by 6.30am so that we could watch him open his birthday presents. We obliged, but Sam was the only person who was full of life at that time of day. He is going skiing in February so I bought him some ski wear, the outer layer met with his approval, but when he opened a box containing the base layer he suddenly became very embarrassed and he tucked them out of sight very quickly. Later in the day he gave me a stern telling off for embarrassing him, it is most odd that 13 year olds can be such prudes about perfectly ordinary things yes they find toilet humour absolutely hilarious. I asked Sam what his favourite presents were, I wasn't surprised to hear that he thought his new PSP was great, but his other favourite was more surprising, it was a book that he had asked for - The Canterbury Tales. Sam is not a keen reader of fiction at the best of times and even bookworms find Chaucer challenging so I assumed it must be a passing whim when Sam asked for the book for his birthday. I got the modern English version, but I had a quick look at it and it still required quite an effort, but I caught Sam with his nose in the book several times yesterday. I think he had a really good birthday, but as you will see from the picture he wasn't too keen to pose for photos.