September

I have always liked this month, the ending of summer, the start of another school year.  Somehow those first few cooler wetter days always manage to seem refreshing - as if the summer had been one long unbroken spell of torrid heat (when of course, being Britain, it has actually been cold and wet for much of the summer).

That sense of a fresh start, with the slate wiped clean, obviously affects Julie too.  This week she has surprised everyone by making another serious attempt at studying.  She only had a few home tuition sessions – a light timetable to begin the year with - but she dug out her books and spent several extra hours revising.  Next week she will try to return to the classroom for one lesson, with plenty of support.  If that goes well we will keep trying to add more lessons at school over the following weeks.

Since we have moved to adult services, the team are all new, and none of them have experience of our past attempts to settle Julie back into school.  At the moment, while it is all going well, they are congratulating themselves on their success.  They are making the mistake we have all made in the past with Julie, assuming that her current positive mood is the result of their hard work. They all think that they have succeeded where everyone else failed - through their own special powers of insight or planning.

And maybe they are right: I am not in a hurry to rain on the parade.  If things do continue to go well and we have finally turned a corner - after more than two years of chaos - then I will be so contented that I’m not going to begrudge them a feeling of victory.  If it does all fall apart, then the new team will soon find out what that feels like for themselves, and they won’t need me to tell them.  The tricky thing then will be to persuade them not to give up, but to regroup and start all over again.  At least this time, some of the team can be expected to be on Julie's case for a while so they will have time to try out different approaches if the need arises.

In the evenings, we have finally managed to establish a regular pattern of going to the gym.  Foolishly, I volunteered to be her gym buddy, which is not altogether a good idea (for me):  nothing reminds you more of your age than working out next to a sixteen-year-old.  We have also been swimming every weekend, though it has proved difficult to find a local pool that is not overwhelmingly crowded and noisy, which tends to cause a lot of difficulties for Julie.  She swims doggedly on for as long as she can stand it, but we always have to give up eventually.  Could pools not run quiet sessions for people who are not very robust and who are sensitive to noise?  "Library sessions", we could call them (Julie loves libraries).

We also found time to see the new Anna Karenina film, but I think films and TV programs that I watch with Julie could be the subject of a whole post some day.