After Lindisfarne

During our holiday we went back to Lindisfarne. I love Holy Island, it's one of those places that has great spiritual significance for me, more for its part in my happiest childhood memories than for any religious reason. The small round-bellied stonewear jug I bought there with my icecream money one year. The taste of mead, sipped cautiously to much face-pulling (I still don't like the taste of alcohol, so this is just as true of me now as at nine years old). The anticipation of driving across the causeway where silt sprinkles the road and wading birds idly observe our passing. The remote island otherness.

The tiny (relatively recent) packed-full museum is beautiful. We came home with some more colouring sheets and a bundle of rubbings, stampings, and tracings done by the children, for me to stash in cardboard folders (my go-to organisational tool for collected "potential future projects, interests, etc").



Today, Jenna pulled out some papers and started trying to design Celtic knotwork and illuminated letters. She grabbed a book about the Lindisfarne gospels, another about knotwork, and another about form drawing, and sat down to work at it.



The others wanted to colour some patterns, and I went looking in my envelopes of interesting things to see what else I had. Celtic knotwork inspired boxes. Yup, that'll do. Morgan remembered Secret of Kells, and Jenna put that on the laptop for them. Rowan tried to read the Gaelic verse of Aisling's Song. I pulled out some more books to see if there was anything they were interested in.





We don't often have a day that looks much like school learning, but when we do we REALLY do (and it's never the things I *think* they will want, in the order I suppose is logical, if I had suggested this it would have met with "no thanks" all round)...

(To make this a halfway accurate day in the life I also have to add that there was a couple of tile games, chicken feeding, soup making, beading, rough and tumble, Minecraft, nit-checking, crisp eating, sitting in cardboard boxes, and running up and down the garden shouting something about the tree chasing them!)











Yup, let's just call our ordinary life "eclectic". :)