100WCGU #100 – ‘Camping’

This week, the 100 word challenge reached 100 weeks. This means that the challenge for the week was to write a piece where every line starts with the letter ‘c’ (Roman numeral for 100, of course!)

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‘Careful!’ he exclaimed as she struck the match for the first time. ‘You must be careful with those. Dangerous things.’
‘Condescending little man’, she thought, as she continued with what she was cooking. Beans, sausages and pasta was hardly challenging, but it was all her camping stove could cope with.
Concentrating, she moved the sausages off the heat and put the pasta on. Eating cooled sausages wouldn’t hurt him, besides, chopping them and mixing with curried beans and pasta would keep them warm. He’d asked for pudding. On camp, for goodness sake. It would have to be cold custard.

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100WCGU #99 – Beautiful

This week, the stimulus was ‘…the air was expectant…’. What better then, to write about the wedding I was at yesterday

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A hush decended over the gathered crowd of family and friends as the vicar made his way to the front of the church. The organist took this as his cue, and fell silent from the chilled music he had been improvising.
The air was expectant as they all turned to face the door, longing for a first glimpse of the bride. They waited, and they waited. The photographer was taking his time, photos in the car, in the churchyard, walking to the door…
Finally, at last, shadows appeared in the doorway, the organist launched into a well known march and she appeared, looking beautiful.

100WCGU #98 – Eggs

A picture prompt this week at 100 Word Challenge.

As she stepped up on the kerb, she missed her footing and tripped. Shopping from the overloaded bags went everywhere, oranges she didn’t even remember buying rolling off down the hill, while the bread cushioned her fall nicely. The chocolate broke, but since she was planning to use it in the cake later it didn’t really matter. The problem, however, was the eggs. The box had opened as it fell, cracking them all on the pavement. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ground was so hot that it appeared the eggs had started to cook where fell.
She laughed.

100WCGU #97 – Heat

100 word challenge for last week was ‘Heat’. I’m a bit behind…

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‘…and then turn down the heat to simmer for 20 minutes. Can you manage that?’

 

Yes, I think so. How hard can it be? Left alone for the first time, with dinner to cook, a microwave meal wasn’t going to be a big enough adventure, so I’d called my nan for instructions on cooking the mince that I’d found in the fridge. I chopped and sliced the vegetables – not neatly it must be said, but in they all went. Then the mince, some sauce and some seasoning. And then the wait.

 

It was worth it, not bad for a first attempt.

STEM session 6 – Midlands Air Museum

Last Friday saw our final STEM session of the year – and what fun it was!

The day was sunny and warm, which was good as the plan that our STEM Ambassador, Ken, had was to show us around Midland Air Museum, where he is a volunteer and which is just down the road from our school.

He was joined by Gordon, another of the volunteers there. Gordon saw active service and flew Mosquitos. Between them they were very knowledgeable and were able to communicate well with our pupils, managing the tangential questions that they ask so well.

We started with lunch in the shade of the largest plane, the Argosy. The first trick for this plane was that it’s nose opens up to let the cargo in! All of the pupils climbed aboard and those that could climbed into the cockpit to discover that the radio was still receiving and that none of the other switches worked (phew).

We continued our walk around the museum, looking at various parts of planes, naming them and recalling how they work. We also sat in a helicopter and went up into the cockpit of the Vulcan. Wow, that’s tiny, more so with seven people squashed up there!

To link in to a flight or history topic, this place is worth a visit. The volunteers really do know their stuff!

And a HUGE thank you to Ken for all his hard work this year!

112. The romance of the Underground

150 great things about the Underground

The arteries of the Underground can pull tight around your heart.

The crescendo roar of a train as it rattles through a tunnel towards the platform plays with your emotions in much the same way as that of an impending public declaration of feelings.

It finds parallels in the steeling of nerve and numbness of limbs that always comes before a moment of intimate confession or personal commitment. I love you. I don’t love you. I can’t bear it. I can’t live without it.

The train charges at you with a force that jars and jangles both physically and psychologically. And you are reminded of other times in your life when every bone and sinew was a-flutter with the advent of something of equal provocation: a hello, a goodbye, a negotiation, a termination.

The possibility of unbeatable joy. The probability of unbearable sorrow.

It is one of the most bittersweet…

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100WCGU #96 – thoughts from the bench

The prompt for this weeks 100 word challenge

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Look at them, standing in a row. It’s like they are waiting for a bus. That one on the far right, he’s seen the joke and he’s laughing that no one told the bin on the other end that it was a green day and not a grey day. I bet he feels silly, with the wrong clothes on, standing out in public view like that. Still, the others don’t appear to have noticed. They are watching very carefully for something to happen. A seagull to steal someone’s sandwich perhaps, or to poo on their heads when they aren’t looking.