Miles got his A Level results today a total of 995 marks out of a possible 1200, 960 marks required for 2 A's in Mathematics and Further Mathematics. He did not do as well as he expected on the Further maths papers but he cleared the 960 bar which was all that mattered. He doesn't need either of these qualifications to do his Open Uni. degree in Mathematics which he started when he was 16 they are both for CV purposes although the qualifications are useful practice for the degree work. Well done Miles and I am proud of you. You did most of it on your own which is pretty good going . Life is a lot easier as you know when you have you Uni tutor to turn to. Skateboarding and a bacon butty treat for the lad tonight! For anyone out there , you know who you are , who thinks home education isn't good for children: you are wrong!

Yesterday we went to Scarborough to take the lads skateboarding at the wonderful new skate park there. Fo and I went off for a trek around Scarborough because the tide was in and we couldn't get onto the shore under the cliffs to look at rocks. Well we had a surprise when we found out that the Rotunda Museum in the South Bay is not just a museum but a geology one! Yum, yum. We had an amazing 90 minutes limited only by having to get back to the lads because they were probably were wondering where we had got to. Straightaway I got a copy of "Yorkshire Rocks and Landscapes! a book of geological excursions mostly in North Yorkshire. This is rarely on sale and you cannot get it on the net either. There are excursions in Swaledale which I know really well so I was very excited. Seeing dinosaur footprints for the first time was very interesting I spent a bit of time thinking about that but in the kids section upstairs , joy of joys, they had loads of rock and fossil specimens to handle and I could use my hand lens , which I always carry, to really examine the samples which were mostly unweathered. A Permian conglomereate, a sort of stew of small rocks in a cementing agent (limestone?) and the Oolitic limestone were really interesting under the hand lens. This limestone is made up of oolites , little egg shaped parts made up of a grain of sand in the center with concentric rings of calcite around it. Amazing under the hand lens and 1/4 of the North Yorkshire Moors is made up of this stuff. The lads had a great skate session although Clifford really banged his foot which was quite swollen when we met up. Well we brought them up not to moan and he didn't and he had skated the last hour of the session with this injury. Good lad. Fish n chips followed at Hadley's Fish Restaurant in Whitby then home and we watched "One flew over the Cuckoos Nest" . A great day .