The good news? My toe is feeling much better. The bad news? The doctor had nothing to do with it. He has no idea what caused the apparent trauma. But I did convince him to refer me to a podiatrist, known in the UK as a chiropodist, apparently.

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This weekend it’s been rainy, cloudy, and grey with a chance of grey. Friday night I developed a mysterious toe pain. The mystery is that out of the blue, it hurt to walk on my left foot. I have my suspicions, and we’ll see what the NHS doctor says this week. So between the weather and the foot, hiking was right out. …

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Sam’s latest literary obsession is Narnia. We’re currently reading the third book of the Chronicles (in publication order), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which the children access Narnia through a painting. The other day Sam said, “I need to get into Narnia.” I asked her if she’d tried the wardrobe in her room. …

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New segment at the start of French class: we make a craft that we use later in songs or activities. These milk jug top ladybugs (ladybirds here in the UK) are pretty easy to make: all you need are milk jug tops, stickers or googly eyes, a permanent marker, and pipe cleaners for antennae. Like the lemurs of a few weeks …

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I’ll never forget the first time I saw one of these duck-like cars in France in the late 80s. I thought it was a VW Beetle gone very, very wrong. Turns out that the two cars were developed around the same time, just before WWII broke out. I learned this recently while researching a short non-fiction piece I’m writing …

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Our jaunt to Canterbury was not entirely bloodless.

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I thought this was a pretty dramatic way to enshrine the spot where the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, was murdered in 1170. Other less dramatic tales from our trip to Canterbury to come.

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We had a quiet, rainy Saturday here, which we welcomed as each of us had indoor things we wanted to do: AC worked on the new business he is setting up; I did some writing and research; Sam trashed the living room. It was all good. At one point I happened to look up and out the window and saw a giant red gnome head …

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