Five-Year Diary. Sedbergh. Friday, 20th February, 1976
I slept well last night, and I knew it mattered. I felt enabled by sleep somehow, not just the rest itself but the clarity that came with it.
I’d had a vivid dream. I wish I’d written it down. It was like a night at the movies.
Divinity went well. I’d prepared properly. It was on the prophets, and it showed in the marks I received. We also talked about Micah.
To and from the classroom, I was stiff. Yesterday’s run had left its mark. My legs felt tight, and my feet felt tender.
Physics: we carried out an experiment on conductivity.
The teacher did this thing with water and ice.
He put cold water in a test tube and got a bit of ice to sink to the bottom with wire. Then he heated the top of the tube with the Bunsen burner.
The top started boiling, like mad bubbling, but the ice at the bottom didn’t really melt.
We then had a go ourselves. I forgot to wrap the ice in wire so it floated to the top and melted.
Apparently this means heat goes up in water and doesn’t travel down very well. I think. Something about “convection.”
We are using Ordinary Level Physics, A.F.Abbott.
Geography. I wrote three full pages on soya, coconut, and peanuts, setting out their cultivation and uses. I also made a note to draw a map of the glacial features around Appleby and the Eden Valley.
The project stayed with me. Over the next holidays I walk the foothills near Dufton and High Cup Nick, camera in hand, tracing and photographing the glacial contours I’d heard about at school. I found some academic reference to the glaciation of the Eden Valley. I won the Geography Prize that summer for this essay.
We are reading The New Africa, Gladys Hickman. Six years later I was in Kenya for a month helping a friend on a zoological survey. I met a local boy called Jackson who said he learnt about glaciation from a book on the Lake District.
Maths: the teacher was away, so we worked through the set exercises on our own.
French: We focused on writing headings and compositions on “pour” and “contre” arguments, weighing pros and cons. It felt laborious, but useful.
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