dual personalities

October 10, 2011

On driving

by chuckofish

Road sign in Devon, England

As my sixteen year old son swerved violently drove around a sharp corner on a particularly scenic back road of northern NY (and I do mean northern), I remarked rather breathlessly that it was nice he didn’t have to learn to drive on the terrible narrow roads around his grandmother’s house in Devon, England. Tim, gripping the wheel more tightly said through gritted teeth, “yes, and our road signs are clearer too.” This put me in mind of one of our favorite English passtimes, namely finding strange road signs and attempting to interpret them.

What do you think this one means? Motorcycles should only jump over cars in order to get access to this road?

Then there’s the ever popular

I've really seen this

and the equally cryptic

but not this

Only the British…

3 Comments
October 10, 2011

Sixty-two years ago today

by chuckofish

From an address to the parents by Ronald Beasley, headmaster of Mary Institute, October 10, 1949:

This is the goal we must strive for at Mary Institute: to teach our girls they must live with themselves…If we can develop within the child the conviction that the great things in the world are the things within her–not those outside such as the radio and the telephone–and can give her the inner strength to be herself, to stand firmly by the conviction that she can be herself, then Mary Institute will serve the future as it has the past.

Well, besides the quaint “radio and telephone”, it holds up–I am totally about living with myself.

And for the record, I don’t mind being referred to as one of “our girls”.

1 Comment
October 10, 2011

Individual creatures

by chuckofish

“Sometimes in my capacity as mother, I find myself sitting open-mouthed and terrified before my own children, little individual creatures moving solidly along in their own paths and yet in some mysterious manner vividly reminiscent of a past which my husband and I know we have never communicated to them…”
–Shirley Jackson

8 Comments