This is a shout out to all the mums and the handful of dads who battle that Monday-itis of the very worst kind… getting those school-aged cherubs up and about and off to school after a wet and very indoors kind of weekend.
Oh, the joy of joys! More like trying to wake the dead in this house.
I’ve been teaching my 8-year-old the joys of the Oxford Dictionary, he’s absolutely fascinated that “every single word” is in there. Almost as fascinated as he is with the vintage solar calculator I found buried in the back of my desk drawer “does it really never lie, Mum?” (Well sort of, give or take a creative accounting method or two.)
My obsession with the great book – and its companion the Concise Oxford Thesaurus – has seen its permanent place guaranteed at my writing desk. Despite the advent of spellcheck. Despite the online lookup. It’s the definition of the words that I love exploring and it’s this journey I’ve started sharing with my son.
And so, my darling boy, your mood today on this grey and windy morning is the Word Of The Week: Cantankerous adj. bad-tempered, quarrelsome.
Yes. A decisive, syllabic word reflective of the staccato hammering you inflicted on the piano today in defiance of the school week resuming its relentless, rolling routine.
“That Monday morning he hammered away at piano practice, note by angry note, the performance reflecting his cantankerous attitude towards the task at hand.”
Yours, as she breathes a very deep Monday-morning breath,
Leave a Reply