I watch other people’s shopping carts at the checkout. I think most people do; most people i know, in fact, at least as far as the subject has come up. I make up families and events on the basis of shopping carts: this woman has at least two kids, one small and one very small; this man is on his own and likes to cook; these people are having a party.

Usually there’s some overlap, or at least something I also tend to buy. Sometimes the person in front’s cart contains something I’ve forgotten so I can run and get it. But today, the woman in front of me had nothing in her cart that would ever have been in mine, and not only because I prefer different brands or different flavours: all light, ready-made, pre-seasoned. In fact no ingredients, only products. Even the non-food items were alien, though I don’t remember what they were.

For the record, mine was shallots, olive oil, phyllo dough (see, I do buy some ready-made stuff, I’m not such a purist that I make everything from scratch), a cucumber, a bell pepper, frozen chives, red wine, chocolate, organic-waste bags, toilet paper, bathroom cleaner and washing soda.

Is it hopelessly naive of me to think of the square root of x as “the number that x is the square of” and that, consequently, 2(sqrt 3) * (sqrt 3) is 2*3, that is, 6? Why does my daughters’ math book want them to calculate it as 2(sqrt 9) first? Granted, that also comes out 6, but why the extra step?

Also, don’t they teach them that the square of a+b (can’t do proper math notation) is (a squared) + 2ab + (b squared)? When I drew the square-with-rectangles that I was taught decades ago to visualise it, the girl who was struggling with the problem didn’t understand the visualisation any better than she understood the problem itself, and insisted that it was only (a squared) + (b squared).

Filia Prima says it’s the math book, and our friend who is tutoring her (because she got interested in how a math book can make mathematics so much more complicated) tends to agree.

There are eleven people in our house at the moment, speaking three different native languages (Dutch, Swedish and German) and using English as common language (well, the adults, the teenaged girls and to some extent the ten-year-old Swedish boy). It makes for interesting confusion: starting a sentence in German and finishing it in English, strange errors like “inheritage”, or “copy cuffs” for “coffee cups”. I find myself speaking German to my daughters without noticing, or English to my other half but he usually doesn’t notice either.

The four-year-old German boy is completely unperturbed by all of this. He corrects our errors (“der Schwanz!”) or puts his head to one side like a bird when he can’t understand something because we use the wrong vowels. It’s extremely good for my German, because I have to speak carefully and correctly. I’ll miss him when he’s gone home (in a few hours now), though I’m glad I don’t have a four-year-old of my own any more, because they’re exhausting even if they’re that cute.

Some decades ago I had a boyfriend who had a sign on his door:

We speak German
On parle anglais
Wir sprechen französisch

which is exactly how I feel now, except that any French I speak is accidental. (He also had a sign “BELLEN SIE BITTE” and when I came to his house for the first time I made his day by doing what it said, rather than what it seemed to say. But he was an inveterate atheist and I jilted him because of that.)