BRRRRR

I don’t know for sure but that is probably IT, last night I took a pile of summer-chopped wood and lit the fire.

This morning the car thermometer registered 2 degrees and by the time I reached the top of the hill it read minus zero.

Maths is a weird thing isn’t it?

I was sitting with Minnie trying to help her prepare for a test on fractions just the day before and she was faced with (2-2) x 3x1/4 – the x there is a times or multiply, not an x.

I said, well that one’s easy.

Apparently not.

Minnie has an original grasp of the things around her. She already knows more about how to straighten hair than I will ever do, more than ANYONE will ever need to if you ask me- but give her a scientific thought and she’ll surprise you.

Last week we were trying to make pancakes when she suddenly asked.-

‘You know that water they found on the moon….?’

Luckily I knew a little – I had been particularly excited to read that one of the scientists that was working on this was Ms Sunshine, so I replied yes.

“Why doesn’t it fall down on us?”

I had to think about it for a couple of days and now I’m pretty sure it has something to do with gravity, but I am a little confused about the up/down thing that lurks behind her thought.

So, back to the maths.

After she came up with four different answers I explained that ANYTHING multiplied by zero is not worth working out and as 2-2……….

She stared at me like I had just fallen from another planet.

“Well if you have 2 oranges and you multiple them by nothing you’ll have nothing” I suggested helpfully.

“You mean, if you have two oranges and you do nothing to them they will disappear?” she asked.

“No’… I hesitated, “that’s adding”. I thought as I spoke. “Take two oranges, look”, I took two oranges from the fruit bowl, “and imagine that I decide to multiple them by two, what would I have?”

“Four oranges”

“Yes and if I decided to multiply them once?”

“By what?”

“A single digit smaller than two”

“er, three, no …….. two oranges”

“Yes, and by nothing?”

There was a pause, a long pause.

Which made me think of the joke about the Polar Bear that went into a bar and said “can I have a …………………………………pint?”

And the barman said “why the big pause?’

And the bear said “to hack through the ice in the winter.”

“Look,” I said,”if you’ve got a single lot of two oranges you’ve got two and if you’ve got no lots of two oranges you haven’t got any.”

“I thought you said I had two oranges.”

I don’t know, maybe she’s right about the water on the moon and that’s why the ground was wet this morning.

And a beautiful morning it was, crisp and clear, a faultless blue sky and as I drove up over the hill the stark outline of the distant mountains.

The mountains are always there, I think, but you can’t always see them from here. The locals say that if you can see them it’s going to rain.

But some of the locals say that Michael Jackson is still alive and hiding so I’m not sure how far we should go in trusting their wisdom.