Distracting hands

'Straordinary. The BBC's political correspondent was talking tonight on the news and I haven't a clue what she was reporting on because I was totally distracted by ... her hands. No, she wasn't really waving them about much - no unseemly sempahoring - but rather kept them for much of the time discreetly hidden below the frame of the picture.

No, the distracting factor lay in the unsuitability of the woman's gloves. Dressed becomingly in a pale cream coat and an extremely pleasant pale blue scarf, fetchingly shot through with a gold that matched her hair, the reporter was sporting what looked like a pair of gardening gloves. In blue, with dark blue bits round the fingers. And they didn't even look like her own gloves, being large and cumbersome and rendering her fingers like a bunch of blue bananas.

Had some kindly cameraman lent her his gloves after a long wait in the cold? I think we should be told. But what was she talking about again...?

Handy reminders

This is the rather splendid crest of Clan Mackintosh, into which, give or take a few spelling changes, I married more years ago than I care to remember. The motto, in plain English, means "Don't touch the cat without wearing a glove", and I have always taken it to mean that Mackintoshes are prickly sorts who need careful handling. Not today. Today, I was on Molly duty. Molly, as some of my readers will understand, is the Rectory cat, and she was requiring to be fed while her human was away. To cut a longish story painfully short, she bit me. I admit it was probably an instinctive move on both sides - I moved too quickly to rescue some papers she had skited to the floor, and she moved even more quickly to defend her territory. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you ....

As a result of this mishap, I have had my tetanus shot updated. They asked at the surgery how long it had been. "More than five years," I replied, airily. Turned out I last had a shot in 1989. Tempus fugit an' that. And they don't just give you a tetanus jab now - it's combined with diphtheria and polio inoculations. But I was glad to take precautions - I have a dear friend currently suffering from septicaemia as a result of a gardening injury to a finger. I imagine he wasn't wearing gloves either.

And another finger story - this time of amazing dexterity. I knew the days of questioning the use of mobile phones in education were numbered when my pupil whipped out her phone today to call her dad. She can touch-text. I've never seen someone text as quickly as I can type while conducting a conversation and looking at me, not the phone. I was dead impressed. I just hope her thumb can stand the pace.