Our Vicar’s Wife: International Superstar

If you were listening to Radio 4 in the days when Our Vicar’s Wife was Our Primary School Teacher, you may have heard a bright young thing winning a national short story competition with Mrs. Dean’s Dilemma. It rose, according to the Irish host whose name I forget, like a flower from the thousands of others. This lady was Miss Anne Durdin, who later became Mrs. Peter Thomas, and still later my lovely mother.

On Monday OVW made her much anticipated return to the world of radio, appearing on Libby Purves’ The Learning Curve, talking about that best of topics; twins. In her capacity as Primary Education Consultant for Tamba (Twins And Mutliple-Birth Association) Mum was able to give wise words on whether or not to split twins into different classes. Never much of an issue to The Carbon Copy and myself in our primary education, since my First School (pop. 80) only had one class per year, and sometimes two years per class. As the years went by, we were in different classes for lessons, but the same house – until we converged back towards each other, and ended up in most of the same classes for A Level. Not a particularly deeply thought out process, but one which hopefully didn’t do us too much harm – we both managed to get degrees without hating each other, so that’s probably a tick.
Anyway, if you’d like to hear OVW, you can Listen Again here. Not sure how this works for non-UK readers, but good luck.

On an entirely different note, Ruth sent me a salutary email this week. Johnny Look-in-the-Air shares not only hyphens with Simon Stuck-in-a-Book, but also a reluctance to look where he’s going. In weeks when essays looked unlikely to finish themselves, I could sometimes be found wandering the streets with my nose in a book, to the peril of pedestrains, traffic and myself. See the page here; don’t worry if your German isn’t the best, there is a translation on the right hand side. Thank you Ruth, I shall take your warning to heart.