In favour of the proposal, firstly, is that I can read books without having them clutter up the flat, e.g. the Bernard Cornwell Anglo-Saxon series, that’re my equivalent of beach reading. Secondly, I think I would buy a greater variety of books if I had them on the Kindle. Buying a book at a bookshop is quite a deliberate and well-considered act, because one has to carry the book home and find somewhere for it. An instant electronic file is a less weighty decision in both respects. Thirdly, there’s the carrying around of books post-purchase. My George R. R. Martin books simply don’t fit in my bag, which started me thinking that a Kindle would fit nicely into the front of my satchel whatever I was reading. It would also make taking books on holiday extremely easy. Fourthly, I wouldn’t have to wait for delivery when I ordered a book. Finally, if I were to get the 3G version, I could sign up to fine magazines and have them sent to me even when I was on holiday.

Against the proposal stands, of all people, the mighty orator, author and bibliophile, Marcus Cicero, who said, “a room without books is like a body without a soul”. By buying an e-book reader, am I contributing to the decline of the physical book and the wonderful, physical bookshop? I’ve been organising my book collection obsessively since I was around five years old. I like them to show off my interests and be displayed for visitors or define the function of the study. Books make furniture look better. Secondly, some books will always need to be in hardcopy. If you were researching using more than one book, that would be very difficult using the Kindle, because you couldn’t compare the two side-by-side. Cook books, too, are better from the page than on the computer screen (although I use the internet for recipes too), as they’re less worrisome if they get covered in spatters of food. The pictures look nicer, too. Thirdly, an e-book reader can’t compete with the texture of a book and turning the pages oneself. I would still have to buy copies of books that I particularly liked, thereby reducing the problem, but not solving it. Following on from both points two and three, not all books are available to buy electronically anyway.

In conclusion, the obvious answer is to buy a Kindle and read certain books on it while buying physical copies of others where desirable or necessary. So, do let me know if you have an opinion on the subject. I’m very close to pressing the ‘go to checkout’ button, but it’s not yet too late…

Thanks to cautious (ha!) use of the hints option on Ancestry, the family tree has now grown to over 2000 people. Dan regularly tells me off for researching people who are only related to me by marriage, but, if youhave ever done any research into your family tree, you’ll concur that it can become an obsession until the tree has so many twigs you can’t remember how some of them grew.

Thanks to this obsession, however, I discovered a fascinating lady called Norah Newbury Inge (my third cousin, five-times removed), the daughter of a school headmaster from Wimbledon. Born in 1900, Norah comes into view for the first time after the 1911 census  in 1936, when she returned to Britain from on the P&O ship ‘Strathnaver’. She had been working as a school teacher in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon).

In 1942, she was evacuated along with 1000 Japanese women and children from Singapore to India, listed as a missionary, but no doubt teaching too. Returning to Britain in 1946 on the ‘Andes’, she is certainly listed once more as a teacher and probably found plenty to do in India in those four years. She may also have attended her cousin Vernon’s wedding in 1944 in Delhi.

In 1948, Norah became the principal of St Margaret’s Primary School in Singapore. St Margaret’s is the oldest school in Singapore, founded in 1842. The school’s Wikipedia article suggests that she did some good work there: “Domestic Science became part of the school curriculum, a netball team was formed and a Girl Guide company was incorporated. It was Inge who first conceived the idea of building a separate secondary school.”

Norah was heavily involved in the Guiding movement, acting as a Colony Commissioner until Singapore achieved indpendence 1965. She was awarded the Medal of Merit in 1950 and the Beaver Award in 1959 for services to Guiding. Whether Norah was still in Singapore right up until independence is not clear. The last passenger listing for Norah is from a trip home in 1957 on the S.S. Patroclus. She intended to stay in Leicester for four months, but then to return to Singapore. She remained principal of St Margaret’s until 1958.

At some point, Norah finally retired to Britain. However, in September 1986, she returned to St Margaret’s at the invitation of a group of old girls to celebrate Children’s Day. A local newspaper recorded th

Norah as a Guide Commissioner in Singapore

e event and adds some interesting information about Norah’s significant contribution to Guiding in Singapore:

Singapore’s oldest girls’ school, St Margaret’s, celebrated Children’s Day yesterday with a special 86-year-old guest. She is Miss Norah Inge, a former St Margaret’s principal and founder of the senior section of the Girl Guides in Singapore.

‘We were the first Ranger company in Singapore’, said Miss Inge, who flew in from Britain on a visit arranged by old girls of the school. To her, pioneering the Rangers for 16- to 21-year-olds was something she had to do, as the girls were growing too old to be Guides.

Her Ranger company comprised girls from several schools. She was also the first girl guides trainer with a camping licence, enabling her to take girls on camping trips.

As principal from 1948 to 1958 of St Margaret’s – the oldest girls’ school, founded in 1842 – she introduced domestic science and mother craft, which taught girls to look after babies.

She had the personal touch, and even ventured into the water to teach girls to swim.

But Miss Inge remembers her career as principal in somewhat different terms. ‘I was one of the very few principals who knew most of the parents. I used to go to every home that had a girl in the school’, she said. In those days, she recalled, several areas of Singapore were slums. ‘I don’t think many principals have the number of personal contacts that I still have’, she said.

And, not surprisingly, though Miss Inge is well on in years, she has not cut her ties with teaching. Twice a week, she teaches in a school for the mentally and physically handicapped in Britain, where she lives.

From the Straits Times, 1986

Still teaching at 86 – she must’ve been a phenomenon. Norah died in 1995, aged 95.

Front of a felt gadget case I've just finished

Back of the same showing the belt clip and user's initials

We’ve just received a batch of new wireless controllers for the whiteboards at work. Desperate not to lose the bits, I made myself a case to keep it hooked on a belt loop. Above is the second attempt, made for a colleage. Quite pleased with it – it’s a bit more sophisticated looking and all the flaps and the belt clip are more secure.

My original idea was to make Dan a bookmark for Christmas, which I did, but I’ve also ended up with a pile of nine bracelets in different patterns and colours and two embroidered, hand-stitched cases for different electronic devices. There’s something deeply satisfying about tying knots and making a line of neat stitches, much like building a wall or completing a jigsaw puzzle.

The bracelets so far...

Creating a pattern of knots compared to free-form sewing is like writing a poem with a formal structure compared to being allowed to

write words wherever on the page. There are rules – a certain number of knots fits and forms the pattern. If you get the number of knots wrong or you take the threads in the wrong direction, then it doesn’t look right. It’s more demanding and less forgiving, thus, more satisfying. You know when you’ve finished and you know you haven’t cheated.

Colour choice is also fun. I discovered that red, orange, yellow, brown and purple look amazing together. Shades of one colour are subtle and sophisticated. Orange is really hard to match up most of the time. Gold is glitzy and goes nicely with light and dark blue, but the metallic thread is harder to knot tightly and thus you need more of it. For some reason, brown thread always seems slightly stiffer and more tightly spun.

Making bracelets has become a habit and I miss it when I don’t do it. My hands feel wrong. Thought about selling them on Etsy (or what seems to be the local equivalent, Folksy), but I’ve only managed to make nine in a month! Maybe need to build up stock first.

If you want to have a go, I suggest you visit this wonderful site: http://hbernb4.atspace.com/

Fact is, when not engaged in the enlightenment of ignorant teenagers, over the past two weeks (or is it three?) I’ve been hooked on researching the family tree. This all stemmed from my bright idea to put a small (note, SMALL) family tree in the back of the wedding album so that our future offspring will know how all the people in the pictures are related to them. Then I registered at www.ancestry.co.uk, but rather than using their tree-building programme, shoved all the data into a free programme I downloaded from www.myheritage.com.

Ancestry’s pretty thorough (on the medium price plan option) – you can access census records from 1841 to 1901 (not 1911, yet, though); birth, marriage and death index records; and, in some cases (particularly in London) marriage and baptism records in more detail. The military records from WWI are also interesting, particularly for physical descriptions of one’s ancestor. Rather more personal than census records. My most successful investigations have been into the branches of my family who lived in London. Being able to see fathers’ names on marriage records makes jumping back to the 19th century very much easier. If you can’t bridge the gap between the elderly living and the 19th century, going back is quite hard. For example, my mother-in-law doesn’t know very much about her grandparents, and so we’ve hit a brick wall, because I can’t push back into the richer census records. Similarly, but for a different reason, my great-grandfather is very hard to pin down. The perils of having a name like Edward Browne in London!

However, we’ve had wide-ranging success in getting back to great-great-great-great-great grandfathers in several branches. It turns out that I have impeccable working-class credentials, except in a couple of cases, where we go back to Kentish farmers (not sure how big an estate of 350 acres is!). So many migrated from Kent or Berkshire or Somerset to the Big Smoke to work as tailors, painters and bargemen. I’m very pleased to find that a great-great-uncle was an early motor bus driver in Brentford in 1918, just as my grandfather and great-grandfather were. Two branches owned pubs: one in Kent and one in Brentford. Fascinating, but such superficial knowledge of so many people (645 and counting!).

Of course, the Irish lot are a dead end at the moment. I don’t imagine the records in Galway would be in a particularly good state, but we’ll have to see.

So, I’m pleased with Ancestry in that it’s possible very easily to trace back six or seven generations (unless you’re beset by misspelling of names, which can be a real problem). However, I think what I need to do now is to try to build up a more detailed knowledge of the more recent generations – 645 names is wonderful, but doesn’t really mean very much.

I’ll keep you posted.

We started with a couple of coffees at Le Pain Quotidien (annoyingly misspelled on FourSquare) on Marylebone High Street, which is definitely the easiest fun place to get to from Rickmansworth (don’t start, Watford fans). Caught up with chief collaborator Alys just by the big Methodist church – she was definitely looking more glam than I was – and met Sarah and Lucy outside LPQ. Didn’t have to wait long for a table and spent about an hour sipping from those lovely handle-less bowls they give you and very briefly looking at the paper. Virtuously rejected breakfast, although the food they do there is just lovely, so as to leave room for cheese at our next stop.

At 12.30, we mooched down the road to La Fromagerie on Moxon Street. It was already very busy, so we had time to look at the seriously #middleclass ingredients on show in the vestibule (chickpea flour, anyone?). It’s a beautiful cafe/deli with wooden benches or bar stools and a skylight over the eating area. We ordered two large plates of cheese (Spanish/Portuguese and a mixture of selected cheeses) for £13.50 each to share and two lots of bread. The highlight for me was a gorgeously fudgy blue cheese from Ireland from the selection board that looked like it ought to have grown on the inside of an abandoned coffee mug. Annoyingly, I can’t find the name of it on their website – may have been available but briefly. We had the house white to accompany. I have no idea about wine, but I’m told it was a good choice.

Our next official stop wasn’t until 4, so we went on a semi-unplanned hike through Hyde Park. There’s been so little rain that it looked a bit like an apocalyptic wasteland at the Marble Arch end. A few people sat in scattered deck chairs and one drunk lay in a state of seeming rigor mortis on the grass. We carried on walking until we finally came to a vacant bench and watched the hire bikes go by. Alys and I had seen a docking rank finished and installed by the National Gallery on Tuesday and the scheme launched on Friday. Seventeen of the things passed by in half an hour as we sat there in wonderment (this may have had something to do with there being ranks at either end of Hyde Park and a flat surface in between). Don’t think a single rider was wearing a helmet – they need to fix that somehow. Amused to see them being referred to as ‘Bojo bikes’ on Twitter recently.

We walked most of the way to the Strand to the Waldorf Hilton (3.4 miles, let me tell you) for tea. Well worth a visit. £8.50 for a cream tea, which Sarah, Alys and I had. Lucy had a little strawberry tart instead. We had the old cream then jam or jam then cream debate. Personally, I definitely do cream, then jam. I think it’s because cream will go flat, but jam won’t, so it has to go on the top. It’s a visual thing. We also enjoyed the pianist just outside the door (known as Plinky-Plinky Man 1).

Had a wander back up to Soho via Covent Garden after tea, where we saw the best use of a Bojo bike so far. The first half hour is free, so an anonymous gentleman had borrowed one and was doing wheelies up and down the road. Well, why not?

Having popped into the Chandos for a cherry beer, we met up with my mother, her friend and two more friends for dinner at Kettner‘s in Soho, which is supposed to be where Oscar Wilde was arrested. There are plenty of upstairs private dining rooms (which we didn’t eat in, but saw a great deal of as we wandered about trying to find the loos).

This is my starter – scallops with risotto nero (Nero is Etruscan for black, as you know if you’ve read ‘I, Claudius’. ‘Caffe Nero’ is much cleverer if you know that, too). Lovely scallops. Risotto…well, risotto-like. There was a definite emphasis on both savoury and sweet tarts. The salmon and spinach one I had for my main course was very nice. It came with a little bit of potato salad and some salad leaves. What was noticeable, however, was that my mother had the same as her starter and they didn’t differ particularly in terms of size. Clearly they were trying to help me get into my dress. Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the restaurant was very pleasant (Plinky-Plinky Man 2) and the service generally good, other than a small misunderstanding over a ‘blue’ steak. Prices weren’t bad, either. Starters ranged from about a fiver to £7.50 and mains from £11 to £19. Not bad for central London.

Naturally, after that we did a wild crawl of all of Soho’s cocktail bars and stayed out clubbing until dawn. Just joking. We went home.

1. No one reminds you to tell the head’s secretary that you’re changing your name. I think it was when the timetables first started coming out that I twigged that the coding was wrong.
2. Not only that, but I’ve had to ask for a special set of initials – being ‘TA’ in a school would be extremely confusing, as it usually stands for ‘teaching assistant’.
3. You have to tell the children well in advance that you’re changing your name so that they have time to get used to the idea (as with any other piece of information, such as “this is your fifteen minute warning to pick up your pen…”). Then they can enjoy practising it and trying to use it. This confuses the less bright ones, who then think you’ve got married over the weekend and proceed to try to hug you. In fairness, it does affect them slightly – their form name changes by one letter. They don’t seem to mind. We minded very much when our form tutor got married at school, because we desperately wanted to remain ’10OC’ – read it quickly and you’ll see why. I’ve said to them that I don’t really mind if they can’t manage the new name for a bit. Change is tough for 14 year olds.
4. Everybody seems to take it personally if you don’t tell them specifically that you’re getting married. The large diamond/Facebook doesn’t do the trick, apparently. Should I have worn a big sign all year saying “I’m getting married on…”? This applies to the kids who aren’t in my tutor group as well, so when their timetables came out they came flooding in to ask who this mysterious “Mrs X” was.
5. I can’t write my new surname without consciously thinking about the letters. Too many tall consonants. Must practise.
6. Also, I keep forgetting I have new initials when coding up all the stationery.
7. Irritatingly, the data system has decided that I no longer have an initial – I have become the entity “Mrs X”.

I’m sure everyone who changes their name when they get married has similar issues (I haven’t even started looking at important things, like bank accounts and passports). Maybe I should just have persuaded Dan to change his name instead…

Would you believe that people don’t want to buy us towels and a garlic press? I was under the impression that wedding lists were meant to be domestic and boring. Tell you what, though, we’re going to have a hell of a chuck-out after the wedding. Bye bye all the crappy Argos and Tesco cutlery and kitchen stuff we bought when we first moved in together.

Just the peripheral things left to do now and I realise I’m supposed to be some kind of monumentally stressed-out Bridezilla by this point in the process, but I’m failing heartily. We’ve paid the hotel (don’t get me started on  how much we’re paying for one day of our lives), met the registrar and just about decided on the music. Still loads of things to pay for, although our parents’ generous contributions have helped with that (particularly paying for the Dress). Found out yesterday that the alterations to the Dress (inevitable, you’d have thought) are going to be an extra £125 – and the seamstress doesn’t take cards. Hmm… having said I’m not stressed out, it’s sounding like I am. I’m not. Really. I’m just appalled at how much everything costs. I’m sure we paid less (ignore the deposit for the purposes of this sentence) to buy our flat.

So, the shoes crisis. The issue was that I proposed wearing DMs as an alternative to totally un-me bridal shoes, which will also hurt. I don’t usually wear heels. I certainly don’t wear 3″ heels. Mother had a small fit and we’ve had to come up with a compromise to keep everyone happy. Thus, I shall be wearing proper shoes (from Shu Shu in Pinner) for the ceremony and photos (keeping their use down to about an hour and a half) and metallic pink DMs for the rest of the day! I’m going to keep an eye out for thick socks with hearts on them to go with the boots.

The meeting with the registrar did make things seem a bit more real, particularly as it was held in the room where they do civil ceremonies at Harrow civic centre, so we sat in the chairs they use and Jan, the registrar, mimed out the beginning of the ceremony. Choosing readings has been difficult – once again it’s a question of finding something that’s not cliched and sappy.

So, four weeks to go until it’s all over and we can jet off to Malta and some peace and quiet!

So. The Dress is now sorted. Not that I can tell you anything about it, because Dan will probably read this, but rest assured it’s traditional enough to please my mother, but that it would allow me to get away with red shoes if I wanted. Or diamante Doc Martins. Still working on that one. Happily, to balance out the expense, the bridesmaids’ dresses have just arrived from Monsoon and are as gorgeous as they looked on Sarah, my elder bridesmaid, when she tried hers on a couple of weeks ago. Electric lime green with heavy embroidery all over the bust section. And yes, we did think of the obvious problem and posted the dress on our Facebook group for guests’ reference.

Down the road in Hatch End from the bridal shop is Impeccable, where my brother got his outfit for his Yr 11 ball. We’re getting all the boys kitted out there (now including my grandfather, who’s the only remaining male ancestor from that generation, so gets special treatment). Dan’s wearing all ivory with mint green embroidery, while his merry men are now wearing plain ivory waistcoats and purple heather (note, not a typo for ‘leather’ – it’s not that kind of wedding) cravats. They were originally wearing green, but there’s no way that green would go with the green of the bridesmaids’ dresses.

The invitations are green as well. It took me ages to explain to everyone why everything has to be green. Fourteen is green. That’s just the way of things. Gotta love synesthesia.

So we’re now at the point where the day-time invitations are nearly all dispatched. Not entirely sure when to start on the evening ones… Maybe just go ahead and amend as necessary later on. Then we have the seating plan to do. Given my mother and I are both teachers, the plan will naturally be informed by prior attainment data and the individual needs of each guest… or for matchmaking purposes. Whichever is more fun.

Thus, in an atypical move, we’re going somewhere nearer, hotter and better supplied with interesting archaeological sites: Malta. Not only does everyone there learn English, Maltese is virtually impossible to learn (or pronounce, looking at the place names, e.g. Xewkija), so my usual guilt at not being able to communicate in any living language will be less pronounced.

We’ve also booked the photographer and the band.  My mother’s working on the invitations, so pretty much all we have to do now is check the guest list, buy outfits and wedding rings, sort the flowers out and do the seating plan. Oh, and, most importantly, decide on the wording of the ceremony and what the first dance is going to be. But these things are all less pressing – we have six months to do all that.

Makes you wonder why people get stressed out about weddings.