I think both Mum and Dad would have been proud of me this week.

Well my book is out there and some people are buying it - that is the good news. The slightly less good news is that nobody has written a review yet so I'm not getting any feedback on any good or bad points about what I have written.

My bruised shoulder is still bruised. It the worst athletics injury I have had for a while so I shouldn't really complain and at least I didn't break anything.

I think both Mum and Dad would have been proud of me this week. 

On Thursday I noticed that the geography department at school was doing a charity quiz at lunchtime to raise money for their favourite charity (pumps for fresh water in Africa). I like quizzes so I went along to watch the fun. At the same time as I arrived so did the Head Teacher and a middle-aged man I didn’t recognise and the three of us stood at the back. The organisers wanted one more team – they had 7 but wanted 8 – so the Head Teacher suggested that the three of us could form a team! Gulp! The man was the Vice-Chair of the school governors and was doing a “learning walk” to see the non-academic parts of the school day. Double gulp! 

We were given 3 sheets of questions. #1 was a map of the world where we had to label various deserts, rivers and mountain ranges. #2 was also a map where we had to label countries and seas and #3 was a list of obscure countries and we needed to identify the capital city. Obviously I let the Head be in charge of our team and she asked the other two of us, “How many of these do you know?”. My answer was, “Err, all of them” – which was true. Thanks to my Dad. 

We used to do loads of quizzes at meal times all through my childhood and one of his favourites was world geography. So I knew all the answers to the school quiz which certainly impressed the Head. We scored 72/72 and beat the geography department staff by 1 mark which was fun, except for them I suppose. The geographers didn’t know the capital of the (British) Solomon Islands but I did. 

Then on Saturday there was a cross country race. I went early to walk the course first, just like Mum and I used to do. It was a muddy course, except for a narrow strip in the middle of the track where the organisers had put down sawdust and wood chippings. I could see that overtaking was going to be almost impossible because it would mean trying to run on the wet, muddy parts of the track rather than the drier parts. Only the first few hundred metres were on a hard surface so I did that part as fast as I could, this meant I was at the front when we got to the narrow section and nobody then managed to overtake me. Since it was an open race some of the runners would have been much better than me so it was good that I dragged them down to my standard. A couple of them were not at all happy with me or the organisers at the end of the race, tough!