Gorgeous Gaura

One of my favourite plants, bought in spring owing to the excessive enthusiasm of the man on the market selling it - it had no flowers then so I went on trust that it was gorgeous (as he said) and he was so right. This flowered from about a day after I transplanted it in April, and hasn't stopped since. I thought it had died when we came back from holiday - but with just two days of watering, it sprang back to life and is once more festooned with flowers.

Slightly panicky morning this morning: K pulled her usual trick of asking why she had no clean jeans about 10 minutes before we were due to leave the house. The usual conversation about "were they in the laundry? Or in a heap on your floor?" ensued, resulting eventually in a perfectly clean (worn once) pair being pulled out from under her bed. With one minute to go before leaving the house I realised I hadn't made Conor any packed lunch. Katherine can eat in the Cantine when necessary (like today) but allergy-boy can't be catered for. Happily there was cold pasta and cooked green beans in the fridge, quickly added to with some hastily fried chopped bacon and he was delighted with his lunch (honest - it's his favourite, well, apart from the green beans - he can take or leave them). But finally, they were in school. And I had a day of light browsing and shopping planned in the local big city (ok, largish town) Castres. Then it started raining. Really hard. So instead I had a few more cups of tea and wandered around the internet a bit and just popped to a supermarket in Castres (where some terribly nice Irish camper-vanners asked me in French if I needed help choosing a Scottish whisky...) Then on to lunch with Jac, a bit of a catch up with her, and off to work together. I was just sitting in on another session, which went fine.

Mad dash home (with the car worryingly reporting that it had no petrol, though it clearly did - another broken gauge I suppose) to get the kids, some petrol and snacks for all before back to school for Conor's school meeting. And my humiliation. So, this is all the parents of CP, CE1 and CE2 (6-9 yr olds), plus various teachers and children. Conor wanted me to sit in his seat, so I squeezed myself in. And so the meeting went on, with lots of information about what they will do this year. And I was introduced as the new English teacher... and then the Head Teacher said everyone could go but the CP parents. So I tried to get up. And couldn't. I was stuck in the chair, wedged between the chair and desk. Parents came and offered to pull me out. Mortified, I finally managed to shove another table out of the way and reverse out. As Katherine said on the way home - not having heard the word 'mortified' before "so do you use that word because you're so embarrassed you actually might die?"

Yep.