It was an Open University Open Event in Leeds today. I don’t like driving into Leeds. I really didn’t like the idea of driving into Leeds with two children in the car shouting helpful comments like “you’ve gone the wrong way” and “You’re lost aren’t you?” so by the time Tim left around lunchtime I’d decided not to go. Then I got all pathetic and cried for a bit as I’ve been wanting to go for ages, so I made like a pair of curtains (pulled myself together) did lunch, gathered offspring, and we walked briskly to the train station and caught a train to Leeds instead.
This was quite an adventure. While they quite often go on the steam trains, neither of them could remember going on a train to just go somewhere, although I assured them that we had when we were staying at the Portico once. So they were wonderfully excited to just ride through the rather dingy countryside and into Leeds, where we fought our way out through the excessive numbers of transport police (a couple on every platform and about 8 in the main entrance, I’ve no idea what was going on, but on our way back we did pass a cordoned off space on a platform with bunches of flowers all around 🙁 ) and then grabbed a map from an information place and went off to find the OU.
We found it very quickly, and were directed around to the Faculty section for Maths and Computing. The computing guy got all excited until I said I had done all that and wanted maths instead, so the maths woman got very excited and told me all about it. She said I would be fine with the two starter courses together from February, that they budget for around 14 hours a week but it shouldn’t take me that long, but that it will still take 6 years to do a degree. Ah well. Better get started then – I need to go gather up all our clubcard tokens and send them off as you get four times the face value in tokens you can spend with the OU. Which seemed like a good idea.
When we’d done talking with the faculty and I’d been praised on my wonderfully well behaved children (who just found seats, sat down, and looked at brochures) we wandered around to see what else was on offer, and I found a woman who said there is a scheme, previously for gifted and talented children, but now open to all which allows children under the age of 18 and some under 16 to study with the OU. The schools version of it is called YASS, and she thought the non school version was YAP but I can’t find the latter on their website. I may mail in for further details as it sounded interesting.
After that we went off to see if we could find a camera screen protector for the new camera Big received yesterday (competition prize) but we couldn’t. We did find a pound shop and blew my recent resolution to buy less tat 🙁 Hohum. And then we headed back to the railway station via the Smiths there to finally finish spending on my giftcard, by buying them each a comic.
Train was slightly delayed but not drastically and we came home via Sainsbury’s for a pizza, milk and tantrum session, children now fed and hopefully in bed. Think I’d probably better go and check.
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