My Old School

The weather today has been OK.  No rain at all but it was foggy this morning and then again this evening.  I had a wander down to the village this afternoon to collect a parcel and do some food shopping.

The parcel was sent via Yodel and until recently I collected my Yodel parcels at the Spar shop in the Esso garage.  However the Spar shop has closed and they are doing a re-fit.... its going to be an little Asda shop when it re-opens.  So now Yodel parcels are being dealt with by a new convenience store which has only just opened at the opposite end of the village.  I had read on Facebook that there was a problem with the electricity in this new shop so there's a noisy generator on the pavement outside the door. Even inside the shop the noise was loud so it wasn't easy to have a conversation.  There was one customer ahead of me and she was trying to post some Yodel parcels.  It took ages.  The scanning terminal didn't seem to be working.  The shop assistant unplugged the terminal and plugged it back in a few times, scanned the items a few times, input the numbers manually --- a few times.  He got there in the end though.  Then it was my turn.  He scanned the barcode on my phone... didn't work so he input the numbers manually and that  did work.  But then he took ages to actually find my parcel.  Obviously there was no system in place to store the parcels in some sort of order.  Hopefully its all just " teething problems " and they will get things working smoothly before too long.

When I left the shop I walked a little bit further along to where my old school is.  I was at this school between the ages of 6 and 11.  It was an Infants and Junior School and it opened in August 1909.  The school buildings were extended in 1950 with the opening of a dining room and some pre-fab classrooms and a Nursery Unit was added in 1980.  A newly built school opened nearby in 2016 and the old buildings have been empty and unused since then. I have happy memories of my time at this school.  The teachers were mostly elderly spinsters who were very kind.  You may be able to tell from my photo that the school yard was very steep ( the decking wasn't there in my day ) The infants played in the top yard and of course they had to go down to the bottom yard quite often to retrieve balls that had rolled down the hill.

Listened to the football on the radio this evening.  Newcastle were playing away against Nottingham Forest.  Newcastle did well and won the game.  Final score Notts Forest 2 Newcastle 3.  Two great goals from Bruno G and my favourite player Fabian Schar scored the other goal. Newcastle have moved up to 7th in the Premiership table.

Steps today - 6,912