Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Feed: Saints Preserve, in reply to Sacha,
you can do that?
Yes indeedy. Though I should clarify that you don’t make the gin part, you just make bought gin sloe-y. You pick a whole lot of sloe (blackthorn) berries, prick them all over with a needle or a fork (or if you’re really making heaps, some people make little nail beds that they roll the crop over) or whatever works for you, put them in a big jar with some sugar (quantity to taste, but somewhere between 200 – 300g per litre of gin) and poor gin over them. Put a lid on. Shake every day till the sugar has dissolved, then shake or turn from time to time. After 3 months, decant through muslin into a bottle. If you leave it longer it will end up with a stronger almond flavour, but no more sloe flavour. Then let it age, if you can.
I made one batch as an experiment. We had a particularly bountiful summer in our corner of Bucks, and the sloes hung late on the trees. You need to wait until after frosts have started for the flavour to develop in the fruit. I didn’t end up picking them (I didn’t learn you could) until November, so there were fewer than if I’d learnt earlier, but I suspect the flavour was stronger for it. Certainly the resulting liqour was a lot richer and darker than the sloe gin I’ve seen (rarely) in bottle stores.
The gin is lovely – I particularly recommend it with bubbles at Xmas time.
For additional entertainment, give your children a sloe berry to bite on. If you have more than one child, make sure they bite at the same time. They’ll only bite once, and the look on their faces is priceless. Ah, golden moments in parenting…
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This year was indeed a particularly sad season for Feijoa in Wellington.
Not that I was expecting much from our young trees, but more than nothing would have been nice.
And our miserly passionfruit got shredded and deaded in the June storms last year, so nothing there either.
On the plus side, our current lemon tree seems to be not dying, which is an advance on previous years, and the dwarf peaches we put in last winter produced the couple of peaches that I let them.
But I think with longing of the bounty of the Buckinghamshire countryside on our stint over there in 2011. In particular, I'm longing to find a source of sloe berries somewhere in the vicinity of Wellington, because homemade sloe gin is incomparable. -
Hard News: Schools: can we get a plan up…, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
many of the single sex schools now accept both genders eg Mt Albert Grammar
Geeze, shows how long it is since I lived in Auckland..
So why doesn't the ministry build single sex schools any more, when they're clearly still popular?
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I thought (but clearly I'm wrong) that when schools introduced zones the Ministry of Education had to make sure that every address excluded from was in zone for, or close to if the school has no zone, at least one similar (i.e. single-sex or co-ed) school. Otherwise, how is there any logic for school zones not just being a circle of x distance around any given school?
But clearly that's not the case. Looking at the zone maps, what on earth is the logic for some parts of Mt Eden being zoned for both Grammar and MAGS - and ditto AGGS and EGGS - when, as you note, Pt Chev and Westmere don't have any single-sex options at all?
And while I'm looking at the school zone map - what on earth is up with the Glendowie zone, which lies around the school, but then skips St Johns and has another area around Waiatarua Reserve?
It all seems to me a bit more random than it should be. -
Hard News: Schools: can we get a plan up…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The only school with as many pupils per square metre of site is Mt Cook in Wellington, which has only 100 pupils.
Erm, not quite sure where you got the 100 from. Mt Cook has about 210 students, maybe more by the end of the year. The roll has been grown a bit in the last 10 years - maybe by 20 students or so, so they've had to introduce a zone, but I don't know when they were 100 pupils
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Hard News: Oh, Auckland, in reply to Mr Mark,
Newtown’s my ’hood, and we’re at the market most Saturday mornings getting the week’s vegetables, and pork buns for Saturday lunch. However, it’s only little – there’s not really space for it to get a whole lot bigger – and really just a food market. You don’t get sunglasses there! I think the only way it could grow would be to close off Emmett St and spread up there.
Occasionally St Anne’s hall next door will run a community market at the same time, but still, not the same deal as Avondale or Otara, and nor are any of the other weekend morning markets round Wellington that I’m aware of. I haven’t been to the Porirua one, so couldn’t comment. -
Busytown: School bully, in reply to BenWilson,
So school breakfast can get around at least one bad outcome of having neglectful parents.
And even if you don't want to buy into the whole "children are hungry because their parents are neglectful", or "parents don't feed their children because they spend the money on alcohol, cigarettes, lotto and Sky subscriptions" thing, providing breakfast at school rather than just handing over money means that when parents on the poverty line are faced with competing priorities and trying to decide which bill they're not going to pay because the last electricity bill blew their budget and the landlord's just put the rent up and they're looking for somewhere cheaper but haven't found anywhere yet, it doesn't come to a choice between giving the children breakfast and getting evicted.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Matthew Poole,
children who go to school healthy, not hungry, and dressed properly, will learn better.
But it’s also important to child poverty overall not to see education or learning as the only worthwhile outcomes.
There were people, for example, who said that the Breakfast in Schools programmes was a waste of money when a study found it didn’t change educational outcomes. Of course, the study did find that children in the programme were less hungry. I tend to think that children not being hungry is a worthwhile objective all on its own, even if it doesn’t make any statistically significant difference to measured educational outcomes. -
My cousin is a teacher in the UK. She has taught under the "value added" system, at more than one school. At a hard school, her "value added" was low. When she switched jobs to a wealthier school, her "value added" went up in the first year. But as she put it "I didn't suddenly become a better teacher overnight". Indeed, she thought she worked less hard at the second school, because there were fewer other issues to deal with besides teaching.
"Value added" is as much a crock as the rest of the crock, but it sounds so much more rational and alluring, doesn't it? Yes, of course we recognise that some pupils start school with less learning capital than others, but once they get there, their ability to learn or not is entirely down to their teacher. If they don't learn as fast as the quickest students in the country, it must be because the teacher isn't doing their job as well.
It's not like the things which meant they started with less learning capital continue, and continue to impact their learning. Nothing like that.
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s also worth nothing that since the 80s there are a lot more places calling themselves universities, where before they were called Techs.
I don't know if you meant to type "worth nothing" or "worth noting". But either way is good.
I have a poorly formed memory of a satirical UK piece in the late 1980s or early 1990s, in which a politician and a public servant discussed how to reduce funding for universities and break the tertiary unions. One of the central planks of the method consisted of renaming techs as universities, because then universities couldn't claim that universities were special because they were research institutions. I wish I could remember the rest of it.