Screen print of our Book of Centuries

We tried to do a Book of Centuries a couple of times before, but it was so hard rounding up the glue and scissors and pictures each time that we gave up. Now, we’ve ended up with one after all.  It just grew while we were trying to do something else.  I thought I’d share the idea in case it suits anyone else.

It all started off because Antonia has a hard time remembering names, and needs to hear them many times before they stick.  I began collecting pictures of the people we had studied in history from all over the Internet. I put these in a single folder on my computer, and set the folder to display as a slideshow.  Once a week we looked through the folder and talked a bit about each person until she remembered their name.

 Enheduanna page, with a passage from one of her hymns.

I soon realised that this was a good place to keep all the artists, composers and authors that she came across too.  Then, we started to use it as a basis for narrations.  Now, the slideshow has grown to include quotes, snippets of scores, famous paintings of events and many other things. I’ve included dates and names in the filename so they don’t complicate the pages.  Also Antonia doesn’t notice them, and the idea is still for her to develop her own memory.

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Here are some more detailed instructions for how I made the Book of Centuries Slideshow.  The most important and least obvious one is last!

Making the ‘pages’:  I wanted to have all the ‘pages’ in the book the same size so I made a blank template in Photoshop.  I’m sure just about any image editing software will work just as well.  I add images from the Internet, resize them if I need to, and add text.  Then I save the whole thing as a jpg.

Beethoven page with a tiny extract of the score of the 5th Symphony

Displaying in Windows: in the Start menu, click on My Documents or My Pictures or wherever you decide to keep the pictures.  Browse to the right folder.  In the menus choose View, then as Filmstrip.  On my newer desktop, with Vista, things are a bit different.  There is a button that says Slideshow, and that does a very nice job.

Hans Christian Andersen page with illustrations of his tales

Keeping chronological order: I soon realised that Windows liked to sort my pages in a way that had nothing to do with chronology.  I fiddled with the file names and eventually hit on the following scheme.  Perhaps other people can think of a better one!  My file name starts with a letter or number that indicates the century, or a longer period for earlier times.  Z is for the 21st Century, A is the 5th Century BCE.  The number 8 is the whole 2nd millenium BCE.  When I want to sub-sort, I add another letter AA, AB, AC and so on.  I’ve accepted that I’m going to have to modify the names of the files within each group from time to time to keep them in order. Who knows, if our book grows really big, I may break it into a separate folder for each century.

Yesterday we drove up to Geneva and back, mainly to see some relatives who were passing through. Since we were travelling to Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union, we theoretically needed our passports. In practice the border crossings in the little villages where we went through were completely unmanned. The main border crossing is manned and very busy, but if you go through there you get on the motorway. The Swiss pay a largish annual fee to use their motorways and charge the same to visiting foreigners. We were reluctant to pay this just to travel 12 kilometres into Geneva centre for the only time this year. So we had to take a roundabout route on the backroads.

We spent most of our day chatting over lunch, but we also visited the church in the old town, and climbed the towers. We had a lovely panorama of the lake with its giant fountain.

We also got to see a model of the church and the bells. This one is called Clemence.

Geneva was important in the Reformation, or perhaps conversely, the Reformation was important to Geneva. The main organiser in the city was Calvin, who was French. Strangely, we mostly remember the Reformation in Geneva because Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled from its rigid theocracy (I am quoting the cliché here). Nowadays, we think of Calvin as Swiss and Rousseau as French, though I doubt either would have seen it that way. Our relative was interested in the Reformation, which I had also studied. I was having a hard time remembering any details, but fortunately there were some explanatory posters around.

We found an idyllic spot from which to watch the Bastille Day fireworks which started as soon as it got dark.  This year’s display was pretty and artistic in a low key way.

In the morning, we studied the French Revolution from the fourth Story of the World book, another example of how we skip around.

Le temps des cerises is a French expression meaning the time when you’re young, with the implication that you should make the most of it.  I got back from the UK to find the fridge filled with sacks, bowls and jugs of cherries requiring immediate attention.  It’s enough to turn my few remaining dark hairs white, I must say.  This time it was Mike who picked them using a borrowed cherry picker.  I have fond memories of Antonia climbing on the car roof under the tree while he was away last year.  Mike’s method is more effective, hence the bumper harvest.

I made 6 jars of jam, but the problem is that the cherries are already very sweet, so the jam is even more so.  I imagine it will get used more in cakes and pies than for spreading.  I am planning a cherry chocolate cake!  I’ve decided the way to go for the future is drying them.  Luckily we have a drier so it only takes about 9 hours per batch.  I dread to think what that costs in electricity.  The results are delicious though.  We will freeze them till needed for extra safety – they don’t take up much space.  I am also trying to make glace cherries which I use regularly around Christmas.  It is a long process and I don’t know how well it will work yet.

In the meantime, I have pitted about a thousand cherries!

I decided today not to renew our library subscription.  If it had been free, I might have just kept it anyway, but as we live out of town, it costs us enough that it needs justifying.  I have a few reasons why I decided not to do it:

• Now Antonia has an extra swimming activity, it’s proved virtually impossible to coincide our schedule with library opening hours, bearing in mind that it’s a half day activity in itself.
• When we have made it, it’s proved even harder to return the books on time.
• As the books Antonia reads or has read to her are getting longer, it’s proving less cost effective to get them from the library.  Today, for example, I bought a novel that will probably take us several weeks to read together.  It probably cost less than the gas to get to the library, and it’s lendable or recyclable.
• In any case, I’m finding that it’s the books Antonia lives with that really contribute something to her learning and growth.  Books that stay in the house for a few weeks are quickly read and quickly forgotten.

This week I went to Argentina, virtually, of course! Fortuitously, Antonia’s magazine does about the same virtual travel thing as I am doing, and its country for the month was also Argentina. They decided that Argentina’s distinctive features are: Buenos Aires, the tango, penguins, whales, glaciers, Ushuaia, football, gauchos in the pampas and barbecued meat and mate.

After doing a little bit of research and scraping my memory I decided to read two travel books that touch on Argentina if only in part: Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries.

Neither of these books deals exclusively with Argentina, in fact Guevara’s book only takes place in Argentina in the opening sections. For the rest, he does offer one Argentinian perspective on Latin America. It became clear that Argentina was rather admired throughout the region in the 1950’s, or so it seemed to Guevara and his friend.

Quite a large chunk of The Voyage of the Beagle takes place in Argentina, from Buenos Aires to the Pampas, down to Patagonia and Terra del Fuego. As I expected, Darwin talks a lot about natural history, though strangely, he hardly seems to mention whales or penguins. The Voyage precedes his theory of evolution through natural selection, but it’s interesting to see him trying to figure out cause and effect in what he encounters.

He’s a bit more of a dunce when it comes to people, with the Victorian English gentleman’s horrible attitude to everyone except other Victorian English gentlemen. Clearly, he intended to be objective and thought himself benevolent, but this might not appear sufficient excuse to modern readers. I’ve just reminded myself that he was barely an actor in the various circumstances described, so perhaps he should not be vilified more than those who were. He still gives an interesting slice of South American social and political life – strife between Spaniards and Indians, slavery, runaway seamen, Indian children removed from their families and taken to England then returned, gauchos in the pampas, revolution in Buenos Aires (one of them!) Throughout his time in Argentina he lived on a diet of freshly killed, barbecued meat and mate.

Turning to The Motorcycle Diaries, it was surprising in a way how little had changed. The same social issues were particularly recognisable in Chile. But this is about Argentina. Guevara and his friend still lived on barbecued meat and mate, they still dossed down in a mixture of estancias, inns and government posts, but they had substituted the motorbike for the horses of Darwin’s day. It doesn’t seem as if this was really the best idea, and the motorbike barely made it out of Argentina.

These two young men were utterly clueless about natural history and most other things, but they had their own speciality – medicine. Neither Guevara nor Darwin had reached the positions that made them famous when they wrote these travel books, but in both, you can see their positions emerging out of their specialised knowledge. In Guevara’s case this seems to come from a realisation of the link between social and political circumstances and people’s state of health. When he is discussing this, he suddenly emerges from puerility into detailed and systematic explanation.

Conrad Martens accompanied the Beagle as draughtsman, and some of his sketchbooks can be viewed here.

Next week, I’m going to the UK for real, so I guess I won’t need to do any virtual traveling and I’ll probably have limited Internet access anyway.