I regret to say that today has been something of a dead loss when it comes to housework, however, I am very pleased to announce that I can now calculate both an empirical and a molecular formula with ease.
Well, not exactly ease. There was a great deal of tongue-sticking-out involved.
Oliver came down this afternoon to tell me that he had been struggling with chemistry, and because it is a short lesson he had not liked to keep stopping the teacher to ask her for more explanation.
He said, regretfully, that he had better sign himself up for the Extra Lesson Support Group for people who did not understand something.
I said that I was sure he did not need to take such an extreme step, and blithely assured him that between the two of us we could work it out.
With hindsight I do not know why I even thought this. I did not understand chemistry at school. At that time I did not even have anything else much to worry about, apart from spots and sex. Why I thought things might have improved in the intervening forty years, especially since now I have got so many truly important matters to concern me, like arthritis and middle-aged spread, I do not know.
Unsurprisingly it turned out that they hadn’t. Hadn’t improved, that is.
Oliver had a computer full of quite incomprehensible explanation. I made myself sound learned by telling him that C6H12O6 was the formula for glucose, which was absolutely the only thing I could remember from Chemistry at school, and which made me sound very impressively well-informed, although I am not exactly sure that I hadn’t made it up.
Determined not to be defeated, we hunted through YouTube for chemistry lectures, which we interspersed with the brilliant, brilliant songs by Tom Lehrer, to keep us encouraged.
Apart from the obvious one about the periodic table, I think the truly unawoken National Brotherhood Week is my favourite.
In the end I am very pleased to tell you that we cracked it, and a couple of hours later we were sailing triumphantly though pages and pages of formulas for chemical compounds, and I thought regretfully that if only I had listened at school I could have been a chemist after all.
Heigh ho.
Lucy telephoned after that. She spent last week taking examinations which she thinks she has probably passed, so we had a small celebration about that. Her examinations were of a completely different nature. One was about the Road Traffic Act and tachographs, and the other was about sex offences.
Lucy said that sex offences are boring, and that burglary is much more interesting.
It had never occurred to me that my daughter might one day be required to sit an examination about sex offences, and even more peculiar, find it tedious. What a curious and eventful world we live in.
In other news, Oliver came downstairs last night full of the interesting news that somebody is sending an exploring machine to the moon and funding it by putting people’s photographs on it. The whole contraption is to be left behind, cluttering up the moon as peculiar extra-terrestrial debris.
He has added a photograph of us, as a sort of lunar graffiti.
Obviously this sort of thing is only possible because the moon has not yet got any local council officials. There are no penalties, so far, for littering the moon. I do not know if this is a good thing or a bad, but since so far nobody has stopped it then our picture is going to be up there perfectly legitimately.
It does not have our names on it so if anybody gets cross at some future date and starts to have a go at retrospective prosecution I don’t suppose they will ever find us.
It is the closest I will ever get to being an astronaut.
If only I had listened at school.
Have a picture of the dogs.
