After the Tuscan countryside, with its pale earth , dark cypresses and silvery green olive trees, we went to the seaside. 
I grew up near the Irish Sea, which is mostly grey, but the Ligurian Sea is genuinely blue.

As most of you know, I don't approve of using lots of adjectives, but you're all going back to school and you're going to need some interesting words, so I thought I'd help you out with some alternative words for 'blue'.
A good one to start with is 'azure'. For historic reasons we only use this word for beautiful blues. You tend not to get an azure bruise - or wear azure sports kit( except in Italy where 'azurro' just means' blue'). Originally it came from the Persian word for  a gorgeous blue stone called lapis lazuli, which looks like this:

I think the sea in the picture above is about that colour. Or, if I really wanted to impress, I could write 'the sea was the colour of lapis lazuli'.
What about the sky in that picture? To me it's forget-me-not blue - but to you it might be the blue of a flag, or a football shirt - or a street sign.
​Here are some other blues:

Look at the bottom of the sky. Perhaps it's the colour of pale blue writing paper? and there's a foamy toothpaste -like streak in the middle, while the sea itself is a dark blue you could describe as 'ultramarine'. 
Ultramarine means 'beyond the sea' . you know why? Because it was a pigment made from grinding up lapis lazuli, which came from beyond the sea.

Think about other precious stones. Here you could describe the sky as 'sapphire blue', while the sea in the foreground is nearer to the grey of agate. (Look up stones and minerals - you'll get lots of good ideas for unusual adjectives).

The word 'glaucous' comes from the Greek word for 'grey', but we often use it for a kind of bluish green.

Finally I had to include this picture, where the water in the background is a beautiful clear turquoise. (Another precious stone). In the foreground , where it's paler, it really is 'aquamarine', a delightful word which simply means 'seawater'.
Best wishes to you all for the new term
​Rachel

Hello everyone
it was a busy year with a lot of travelling and then my son's wonderful wedding -- and now I'm on holiday again. This time I'm in a part of Italy called Tuscany.

This is not where I'm staying.
It's the entrance to an Etruscan tomb. Long ago, before the Romans, about two and a half to three thousand years ago, the Etruscans lived in this part of Italy. Nowadays the tombs are empty chambers - I know, because I shone a torch into all of them. .Objects from the tomb are in the local museum (in the town of Castellina in Chianti).

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You can just make out some strange looking Etruscan writing. Apparently there isn't much Etruscan writing left for scholars to study, but here is the alphabet they used. You will see it's a mixture of Greek and Roman (but written back to front).

Then I thought how useful it would be as a secret code. For instance, a few days into the start of term, you may want to write this message to a friend in class:

Can you see straight away what it says?
Sorry about the spelling. I had to be a bit creative.

(Hav u don the homework?)

It will be very bad luck if -which may well be the case - your teacher happens to have had the same idea.

Best wishes
​Rachel

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Here is a postcard from me to all of you . It's the famous bridge at Avignon that people dance on in the song. As you see it's only half a bridge. That's why you have to pay to go on it, I think. That was one place I visited this summer.

​Hardly anyone sends postcards any more, do they? You and your friends probably just put pictures on Instagram. This year I only got one postcard, and here it is

I remember when the sending of postcards was a big feature of being on holiday. Sensible people (like my father) would go out on the first morning to buy a selection of postcards and stamps, and spend the first day on the beach writing them. Of course you had to write different things to different people -what if your auntie found out you'd written the same thing to your grandmother? 
Then you had to remember to post them , so that they would arrive before you got home.
​I used to envy friends who had to write 'ANGLETERRE' or 'INGHILTERRA' because they were somewhere   properly abroad. We were in North Wales, only a hundred miles from home, but still it was fun having to write ENGLAND. 
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I began writing this post before I read the sad news that the firm of J Salmon is about to close, after well over a hundred years of publishing postcards of British places. This is one I received last year - a collector's item now.

This seems to be a simple story told in language  that seems easy to understand, but it raises all kinds of interesting questions. Most of the action takes place in a desert in Texas, so it's a good book for a hot summer's day.
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With the Olympics nearly over and the Paralympics about to begin in Rio, Brazil   is in the news all the time.  This is a most wonderful story of adventure on the River Amazon. Like most books by Eva Ibbotson, it has something to appeal to everyone.

This book is a short book containing  a long poem. It's also surprisingly easy to learn by heart.
​You may already know the story but this version, told in rollicking rhyme, is the best. If you've ever struggled to find words that rhyme, you'll be filled with admiration and envy for Robert Browning's ingenious word pairings. Some of them will be words you didn't even know existed - for years I've been suspicious about 'nuncheon' - but I've just googled it - and it's a real word.
​The main message of the story is, of course, pay what you owe - but it's instructive in lots of other ways :  make sure the people you've voted for do their job  - don't fall for a nice tune - sometimes it's best to be at the back of the queue....

This poem appears in lots of children's anthologies, probably just because it's about an animal. Actually if you try to read it too carefully, it doesn't really make sense, and it even starts off by getting the spelling wrong.
Why do I like it then?
​I think the point about the strange spelling is that it warns you the poem isn't so much about a  real animal as about the  ideas that animal inspires - ferocity and untamed strength. You needn't think too hard about it; just enjoy the thrilling images of fire and creation.
​At the end, the poem asks a simple question - what kind of world can contain both the gentle , harmless lamb and the  'deadly' tiger?
​Even a hundred years ago, there were 100,000 tigers alive in the world. Now there are less than half that number and three species are already extinct,
​The tiger may have a different question . What kind of world contains grass-eating lambs, meat-eating tigers and humans , who not only destroy habitats but kill other creatures for fun?

What else?
​One of my students was the first in his local bookshop to get his hands on it , at midnight last Saturday. At first he was disappointed it was a play script, not a novel - he said he 'wanted more detail'. But then we started reading it...
​If you're going on a family holiday, try to get hold of a couple of copies for  reading aloud together. Cheaper than one theatre ticket, and perfect entertainment  for stormy nights in a tent.

I have very happy memories of long summer holidays, with plenty of time, plenty of paper and a fresh box of oil pastels. I loved the smell,  a mixture of wax and petrol, and the intense colours - but most of all I loved the names .
​There was Sea Green and Olive Green, Aquamarine and Ultramarine, Rose Madder and Scarlet Lake, Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre, stern sounding Payne's Grey and serious Prussian Blue. My favourite was the gorgeous sounding Vermillion - I didn't know then that its name had anything to do with worms.

​If you have a set of crayons or paints you can have fun thinking of the most accurate names for the colours. Here are some ideas:
​pigeon grey...  tomato red....  sand yellow ....  bluebottle blue....

​Send your suggestions to me at [email protected].

    In Shakespeare's  A Winter's Tale the young prince says,  'A sad tale's best for winter'. He probably means 'serious' rather than 'ending unhappily'. This is one of my favourite books for winter. It's a dark, entirely satisfying  story which ends -  the way it should. Set sometime in the past, somewhere in central Europe, it's a sort of Gothic novel, featuring , among other characters, a violent suit of armour. It's about the value of hard work, kindness and courage, but it's also about storytelling, and indeed clockwork. It doesn't take long to read but you'll remember it forever.