Trip to the Guardian offices

 A few weeks ago I went to the Guardian offices on a school trip. The building was very big and had many large windows. Inside, it was warm compared to the icy outside and there were pictures of the set used for the advertisement with the theme of the the three little pigs story. We were led up an escalator by a lady who  I later found out was called Elli Narewski. She took us to an office, where we designed our own newspaper covers. We were shown pieces of news just like the ones coming live into the newsroom. Elli told us to choose two stories to use information from for our front covers. She took photos of us to put on the newspaper. After we had chosen what stories we wanted to do, we wrote our first draft. Then we had lunch. The lunch hall had some really big bright lampshades that I wished we had in our house.

Near the end of lunchtime, I looked out of one of the large windows, at the canal. There were barges floating on the water and graffiti on a wall nearby saying,"OPEN U EYES". The window was right above the canal, so it was a little bit scary looking down from it. There were some adults eating lunch there, as well. Not just the teachers, but some real newspaper writers. They were eating food from the canteen, but we brought our own lunches.

After the lunch break, we edited our work and added headlines and bylines. I took a few photos, too.

This week I went to school for an extra half day because I wanted to carry on making my papier mache mask. I also had to take in my homework, which was supposed to be a poster with pictures and writing about a particular interest or hobby of mine. I'd chosen photography. We'd each been given two A3 pieces of paper in case we made a mistake, on one, but I glued them together because I couldn't fit everything in on one. My mom and I both thought that people were going to be annoying and say something like, "You're not supposed to do that, you have to do it on one piece of paper", so she prepared me with all sorts of answers if someone said that.

When I went into class, everyone was surprised to see me because I don't usually come to school on Fridays. When they saw my poster, lots of people said they really liked it. NO-ONE made any comment about how I wasn't supposed to use both pieces of paper! When I put it down, one of my classmates went up to it and said,"Wow". One girl asked me how long I'd spent doing it, and someone came up to me and said that it was "Sick"(Sick is a cool way of saying, "cool").

When I started carrying on doing my mask, I chatted with the girls who were on my table about Flexi-schooling. They also told me that the whole class, including me were going to  run a mile round the playground that day. I was surprised because I'd thought that they'd already done the running before I'd got there. A few minutes before we were told that it was time to do the running, I had a small argument with a girl who wasn't being very nice to me. I don't really want to write about the argument, though, because a lot of posts in this blog complain about people.

One mile is five laps around our school playground. We didn't have to run. We could hop, skip, jump, or walk.

The first lap that I ran there was easy. The second was hard. Very hard. I walked most of the third one. The fourth, I only walked. For the fifth, I walked and jogged. I drank a lot of water after that.

After we ran, we went back into the classroom to carry on our masks. We made more features by shaping pulp into eyes, ears, mouths, and whatever features we wanted. We secured them to the masks with tissue paper, which we stuck over them, and onto the masks.

I had a really good day.

French Couchsurfers

We had some French Couchsurfers come over about a week ago. They were called Alex and Margot. Margo is Alex's daughter. I went with them to Camden market and we counted how many people with strange hair or hair or hair that was coloured an artificial colour we saw.  I can't remember how many there were, but I think about sixty-three. Some of them had blue or green hair that stuck up in a crazy way. Most of them had pink hair and a few just had hair with a lot of jell to make it stick up. One guy didn't want any photos of him or his weird hair; he said it cost one pound to take a photo of him. Alex secretly took one of him when he wasn't looking.

 Lots of people there had shoes with really high soles. We went to a few shops to look at the shoes with high soles and saw one that was over thirty centimetres high! There were also some other strange shoes with chains on them and one with the British flag.

Later we had some Ethiopian food. In the Ethiopian food, there was a pancake that was quite sour and a beef curry-ish thing. There were chickpeas and carrots in it, too, but I can't remember what else. When we'd finished that, we had some bread with spinach and cheese in it.

We got home quite late, but there was still time to play in the garden.

Bruce Castle Museum talk

Yesterday, while my sister was at cubs, me and my parents went to Alexandra Park Library. As we were leaving, I saw a mini poster pinned to the wall. It had a picture of a picture of an enbalmed mermaid on it and I could remember having seen that picture before somewhere, so I showed the poster to my mum. I hadn't bothered to look at the writing, but she did. My mum said there was a talk at the Bruce Castle Museum and it was happening on that very evening. We weren't sure whether to go or not. In the end we decided to so my dad drove us there and we arrived fifteen minutes late. There were three guys doing the talk and they took turns to say things. The talk was about  their investigation to find out how mermaid and merman relics were made. They are thought to have been made by fisherman in Japan, but for a long time people have not known how exactly they were created. People used to believe that they were made using the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, which is why they are sometimes known as "Monkey fish". The people explaining how the relics were made said that they did an X-ray of the Horniman merman and then some CT scans and 3D prints of it and found out that it wasn't the body of a fish stuck to the head of a monkey; the structure, or skeleton was made out of wire and wood, which was covered in animal glue and fabric. The head was made out of rope wrapped around a stick, and the teeth were real fish teeth. One arm was made out of papier mache, and the other out of wood. All that was covered in clay, and half of it was stuck into the body of the fish. The front part was built up with more papier mache.

making fires

There is this huge-ish candle that me and my sister rescued from the rubbish bin a few months ago. I've just come back in from making a fire in our garden with it. I love making fires. I love making them because I like challenges and making a fire is a challenge; it goes out easily, so you have to do everything just right to get it going. Once it is going then your first reward is satisfaction. Your second is getting to roast sweets or fruit on it and your third is warmth and charcoal for next time's fire. Another fun thing about making fires is  putting wax on them. The wax melts and provides fuel and the flames leap even higher. It also makes a lovely crackling sound.
 I'd say the hardest part about making a fire is getting enough oxygen to the flames. If too much reaches them, they get blown out. If too little reaches them, they get smothered.


While I was out in the garden making the fire, I thought of this book I read called "The Kin". In it there are these people who burn out the inside of a log. They then store the embers of the last fire they made inside the log and then stuff leaves in on both ends to keep the embers in. With the log, they travel on to where-ever they are going to sleep and when they want to make a new fire, they just empty out the embers and with that heat, they make another fire. They then take the new embers from that fire when it burns out and stuff them, with some leaves, into the log and then carry the log on to make another fire, etcetera.


I need to finish doing some homework now, but after that, I'm into the garden to make another fire.

Fire!