June #1: Sports Day & TT Week

The first exciting thing that happened in June was Finn's long-awaited sports day. Being the unusual sort of place that Finn's Manx school is, the sports were far from traditional...

Once you've seen the little film (of Finn laying an egg in the ring and then rolling on the mats), it won't come as a surprise that the activities/sports at this school sports day were decided by the children themselves. The children were then divided into groups that cut across age-groups, with couple or so of children from each year in each group. These then took turns going through the activities, competing to see which group got the highest group score. So, there was group competition, but no individual competition - which meant that there was lots of cheering, lots of fun, lots of trying really hard and not a single crying child. It was great!

Even sceptical granny (who Finn was delighted was able to come along too) was won over by the unconventional approach.

Here is some more of what the sports involved:

But our favourite event was one where the children had to pacify the hungry Manx fabled beast, the Tarroo Ushtey (Water Bull), by feeding it teddies, as Finn demonstrates so well here:

And the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noted that granny was able to make it along to the event, which was wonderful for Finn - we all had a great time!

And, if the school sports day wasn't massive enough (!), it was followed by the dominant event in the Manx year; the TT races.
We're not motorbike fans, but no one is unaffected by the 45,000+ people who come for the 1-2 weeks of practices and racing around the roads. With a starting population of c. 85,000, it should be obvious why it's such a big thing, even away from the track in places like where we live, in Peel.
So, for instance, we had a Peel Day here, where the promenade and harbour were rammed with people, stalls, displays, music etc. We crowded in to see what was on...

And this was something of what we saw:

Finn was rather excited about it all, but not too much, which was nice as it meant that we could get away from it all eventually. We spent most of the time actually on the beach, with the cousins, who had come up for the day, and chatting to everyone we knew from school, who passed by. Peel is a lovely place to be!
And it wasn't just this one event; Peel was alive throughout the week, and we were pleasantly attracted out of the house at times by the sound of motorbikes, to find things like this going on after school:

All in all, it was a rather exciting. Though, none of us were too fussed about actually going and actually watching the races. The closest we got was looking over the fence from the playground in Ramsey when Cori went up there to hang out with the cousins one day - probably a more unusual ways to engage in a motorsport which others will travel the world to be a part of! In fact, we were perhaps a little surprised that Finn wasn't more into the Races, but it's probably that it is more about racing than it is about machines, which would be why he was only interested so far in it all.

This meant that during the two weeks we had to find places to go and things to see which were not along the TT course.
So, we took a trip in to Peel Castle. Though sunny, it was as windy as ever!

Another day I took the two boys off to Castle Rushen. With the Foxdale road closed, we had to go the long way around, which happily went past an old mine shaft, which Finn was excited to stop off at:

And the Castle was a lovely day out, and not too windy, which Finn was very pleased about.

Whilst there, we thought to do a face-swap thing with Finn and one of the manikins. It came out suitably creepy:

Since it makes a sensible place to stop, I'll leave the rest of June to a second post, for the post-TT period, but as a final treat I'll leave you with this picture, of Orry taking it upon himself to clean the windows whilst in the bath, even long after all the water had gone down the plug-hole, as you do: